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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."
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.
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.
Intel announced Xeons with FPGAs last year.