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."

Comments

So, what's the plan?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:So, what's the plan?

[Anonymous Coward]

FPGA's can out perform Pentium i7s in certain scenarios. Here is a video showing how a 200 MHz FPGA can perform a discrete wavelet twice as fast as an 2.6 GHz i7.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er9luiBa32k

The future will be offloading certain tasks to the FPGA, as well as providing downloadable modules that will allow any PC to take on a wide range of roles. One application could be an SDR without any additional hardware, or a data acquisition unit. So, this is all about flexible I/O and optimised processing.

Re:So, what's the plan?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Intel announced Xeons with FPGAs last year.

Re:So, what's the plan?

[Svartalf]

They're big and slow compared to an ASIC, yes.  But the thing is, they're not big and slow overall- they're reconfigurable and you can dynamically change the logic (Witness Altera's OpenCL offering on the higher-end stuff they offer...  You don't offer that unless you're competitive with GPUs...) on the fly.  They have a place and it's not always custom logic.  It's adaptable custom logic- which ASICs **CANT** do.  CPUs are slow and plodding in many of the tasks you're talking about in that space- and GPUs are cumbersome and painful to use compared to them for that use.

Re:So, what's the plan?

[TheRaven64]

My guess would be coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures. Altera FPGAs aren't just FPGAs, they also have a load of fixed-function blocks. The kinds of signal processing that the other poster talks about work because there are various floating point blocks on the FPGA and so you're using the programmable part to connect a sequence of these operations together without any instruction fetch/decode or register renaming overhead (you'd be surprised how much of the die area of a modern CPU is register renaming and how little is ALUs).

FPGAs are great for prototyping (we've built an experimental CPU as a softcore that runs on an Altera FPGA at 100MHz), but there are a lot of applications that could be made faster by being able to wire a set of SSE / AVX execution units together into a fixed chain and just fire data at them.

Re:So, what's the plan?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, all you need is another $3,000 software package (and
another $2,495 per year to keep it up to date) to let you do
anything with the FPGA... no problem, right?

Everyone has that kind of cash laying around for every box
they own!

A fixed $3,000 that's depreciable and a fixed cost of $2,495 annual support? Relative to the $150,000+ annual cost for an engineer who knows how to use it, that's basically nothing.

L2Business, kid.

Re:So, what's the plan?

[Megol]

Strange then that the FPGA market is growing and the number of ASIC design starts are shrinking per year. It is almost like FPGAs are increasingly being used as ASIC replacements in both the high end (backbone routers, RADAR equipment, ASIC simulation) and the low end (replacing misc logic and often a microcontroller). Maybe because they are.

Tricked

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Tricked

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh they did the math.... on a Pentium 60.

Re:Layoffs

[TooManyNames]

The $750 million of "annual run rate synergies" and "track record of rapid deleveraging" should give you a sense of how much and how fast Avago will slice from Broadcom:

http://investors.avagotech.com...

In my experience, higher-ups for mergers like this aren't afraid to cut until it hurts, then hire back later (if absolutely necessary).