Slashdot Mirror
Intel To Buy Altera For $16.7 Billion
An anonymous reader writes: Today Intel purchased chipmaker Altera for $16.7 billion. This follows another huge purchase in the semiconductor industry last week, when Avago snapped up Broadcom for $37 billion. This has been a record year for consolidation within the industry, as companies struggle to deal with slowing growth and stagnating stock prices. Altera had already rejected an offer from Intel, but shareholders pressured them to reconsider. "Acquiring Altera may help Intel defend and extend its most profitable business: supplying server chips used in data centers. While sales of semiconductors for PCs are declining as more consumers rely on tablets and smartphones to get online, the data centers needed to churn out information and services for those mobile devices are driving orders for higher-end Intel processors and shoring up profitability."
That's because you have an Altera up your ass?
Given that FPGAs are big, slow, and hot compared to equivalent logic built as a fixed function chip(but with the obvious benefit of not being fixed function), Altera FPGAs manufactured on the fanciest processes available seem like a fairly obvious product of the acquisition.
Any bets on what other purposes they have in mind? FPGAs with one or more QPI links built in, for fast interconnect with Xeons? Xeons with FPGAs on die? Intel NICs with substantially greater packet-mangling capabilities, at full wire speed, thanks to reconfigurable logic?
Merely producing FPGAs on a nice process is logical; but could also be done just by selling them fab services. They presumably have a plan that goes beyond that.
How will this extend Intel's market in the data center?
Altera said "pay us $1000 this month, $2000 next month, and so on for 2 years, doubling each month." Intel thought it was a good deal and accepted before doing the math.
So another computer guy is getting fat on chips?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Expect layoffs after the merger. Cost cutting is almost always done after mergers. What kills me is that many of those engineers that will get canned will be considered damaged goods in today's job market: unemployed == doesn't have the skilz.
So, if you are at Altera, start looking for another job ASAP before the mass layoffs happen. It happened to me and when all of us from the layoff hit the job market at once, it became very very difficult. And it was an interesting coincidence that most of us were senior level people.
Then why are there five billion Asians?
Altera has many customers who compete with Intel. They are not going to want to deal with Altera anymore. Instead of having Altera as a strong #2, Xilinx is going to own the FPGA business. Good for Xilinx, bad for everyone else.
nt
Time to look at the latest Xilinx offerings. I never liked Quartus anyhow. I stopped designing in Intel chips when they killed the XScale line. They became irrelevant to most embedded programmers. Many years after that management had tried to push the Intel ATOM on engineering saying that Intel said it was suitable for embedded systems. It really wasn't -- it was a PC on a chip.
Given that my personal experience, I think that Intel (these days) is a "PC only" company I hope they keep their fingers off Altera. I expect my hopes to be dashed as early as next year. $10 says Nios 3 will be a slimmed down x86 subset.
You might want to look at the papers from MS Research on their use of FPGAs in their data centres.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Would an FPGA be viable as a lossless data compression coprocessor? That way, the computer could swap to a RAM disk and save space on whatever's currently paged out. It'd be like a hardware-accelerated version of zram (or Connectix RAM Doubler before that).
At first I misread the headline as "Intel To Buy Alberta For $16.7 Billion". My first thought was wow that didn't take long for the NDP to sell out ... and for so little. :)
What was the exact amount?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the early investors of Avago
As far as I know Avago does not carry out the "cut until it hurts" routine
I know the style of Hock Tan, the CEO of Avago --- and from past experiences (from the merger with LSI, et al) the 'cut' were mainly of low level, ie, disposable personels, while key people - those who have been identified to have contributed in key technologies - were often offered plumb hike in salary / stock option to get them to continue to perform
In other words, what Hock Tan looks for are:
1. Talents
2. Products
3. Synergistic deployment of technology
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
We are using Xilinx FPGA for 13+years, when first choosing between Xilinx and Altera the decisive factor was the license terms - while both were proprietary, Xilinx zero-cost software had no expiration, while Altera's one had only 90 days. Our products are based of Free Software/Open Hardware (licensed under GPLv3 and CERN OHL) so it is critical for us to avoid expensive tools as our users would have to use them too just to be able to rebuild the executable image (bitstream in the case of the FPGA) from the source code provided with the products.
Unfortunately Xilinx is gradually migrating away from openness and freedom, working with Zynq I noticed quiet a few undocumented hardware modules, even some primitives now can only be simulated using encrypted code (and so not compatible with free software simulators) - you may find my opinion on this issues in "FPGA is for Freedom" blog post.
Intel is known to be more free software friendly. Do you think that such attitude will get to their new Altera FPGA department? Should we at Elphel already start migration to Altera/Intel?