The article is based on the premise that Altera will stop developing FPGAs for general availibility. Nothing I've seen (and would love to be shown otherwise) so

The article is based on the premise that Altera will stop developing FPGAs for general availibility. Nothing I've seen (and would love to be shown otherwise) so far indicates this. FPGAs has been used as test designs when qualifying fabs for volume production since they are regular, but more complex and closer match to general ASICs than memories. FPGAs are also often used more and more either with internal CPU cores (hard or soft) or as a companion to CPUs providing acceleration, esp data plane processing. This means that the aquisition of Altera is mor of adding a business that complements the CPU business, not remove a competitor from another market segment. Intel can sell CPU+FPGA solutions for data center, big data. But it can also sell more chips and increase utilization in their fabs. And for FPGA users the FPGAs coming out of these fabs will probably be better with higher density, lower power consumption that what Altera managed to design themselves. And getting a Stratix or a Cyclone SoC with an Atom core inside running Linux would be a very neat solution.