I MET DON Richard Corleone of Code Mafia during my recent visit to INQ central, in Harrow-below-the-Hill and learned that this small but efficient company got itself one juicy little deal.

These brave warriors left Nvidia last year but things appear to be going quite well as this is the second big contract its won in quite a short period of time.

Intel is obviously a company that is not afraid to spent money since it has lots of it and obviously somebody believes that Intels support for the game developer community should be at a much higher level than it is right now.

We know that ATI is satisfied with the job that the Code Mafia boys did, and they will continue to cooperate in future as Code Mafia has certainly improved ATIs position among game developers.

ATI, for example, gave away a Radeon 9700 Pro to each person that attended four out of six courses held at its Mojo day last August. Nvidia did a similar thing with from Dawn till Dusk earlier this year but charged each attendee and only pre-selected boys got to get the Geforce FX 5800 Ultra.

Now, apparently, Intel has hired Code Mafia to do a similar set of things to help persuade games developers to use its graphics and other marchitecture.

SSE and SSE2 optimisation will likely be considered but many developers that we are in contact claims that this is not an easy task to achieve, an obstacle, no doubt.

One marchitecture that Intel want to promote is HyperThreading, the latest greatest stuff reserved for the most expensive Pentium 4s but that could also boost games.

All Intel needs to do is to make games developers aware of the threads and perhaps games would speed up quite a lot.

We were told that this does not have anything to do with Intel and ATIs cross licensing agreement. We also know that this is not going to jeopardize or block Code Mafias deal with ATI.

Game development has become an important part of big companies lives, and this is good news for developers who often suffered from lack of support.

the inquirer