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Intel plans spinoff of FPGA unit

139 points by ChuckMcM 3y ago

ChuckMcM 3y ago
Apparently they announced this in October. They are kicking Altera, which they acquired for 16.7 billion back out into the world to live or die on its own. Which feels a bit weird given what feels like AMD's relative success with Xilinx. It also dampens their "US developed" technology pitch (which they had been pushing pretty hard vs other solutions that were fabbed at TSMC) I wonder if they will also give up on their third party use of their fabs. Intel was the first "real" job I ever had and it was during Andy Grove's tenure as CEO and his "paranoid" attitude was really pervasive. I had been working on graphics chip which were the next big thing until the chip recession and then they weren't. And it followed a long series of Intel sending out tendrils outside its core microcomputer (eventually x86/x51 only) winners only to snap them back at the first sign of challenges. I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win.
- AceJohnny2 3y ago
  > I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win. Tragically, I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, I'd be shocked if that were to happen.
- AceJohnny2 3y ago
  > only to snap them back at the first sign of challenges. It's really quite impressive how bad Intel's track record has been. Would you say it's a broad cultural problem within Intel? Bad incentives? (I'b be interested if someone could come up with a list of all of Intel's failed ventures. StrongARM, Optane, Altera... Obviously some of these are par for the course for such a large company as Intel, but Intel still seems to stand out) (I know one reason Apple is so secretive about its ventures is because it knows many of them won't pan out, and it knows that due to its size anything it does has huge repercussions, and wants to avoid that)
  - 1-6 3y ago
    When Intel does something like this, it reveals how tight their operating margin is. This is not a good sign. Intel has never been able to push away from the fact that they'll always be a hardware first company. It's a very tight market out there. TSMC was able to make it with very tight partnerships with OEMs and I doubt Intel can pull off something like that.
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
    I agree with 1-6 that they have always been really focused on their margins, they were never a company that wanted to go into debt for something that was 'unproven.' They have had lots of things they stopped doing, the graphics chip I was involved in (82786) was one, the speech chips, the iAPX431, the modem chips, their digital watch was an early one. I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. When I was their the 386 had just fabbed and I was one of the people watching when the very first chip was powered up and it actually worked (which amazed pretty much everyone). Sun Microsystems was a little startup in Mountain View using the 68000 and getting some traction I suggested to Intel that if they used the graphic chip I was working on and the 386 they could build an Intel branded "Workstation" and both replace the VAXStations they were using for CAD work internally and sell them as part of Intel's initiative to become a "systems company." I got a response to my memo[1] from Dave House who was later CEO but at the time just the head of Microprocessor Operation (MIPO) Marketing explaining to this lowly NCG (new college grad) that Workstations were not much of a market and Intel was only interested in pursuing the "big" opportunities. Six months later I joined Sun (just after they IPO'd sadly) and didn't look back. :-) [1] Yes memo, as in typed up and printed out and put in a manilla envelope where on the last line of the front had it coming from Dave and being addressed to me. And yes, it started as a memo I had printed out and given to my manager because while Intel had "heard" of electronic mail they preferred the "durability" of actual mail and forcing people to use actual mail cut down on "frivolous" communications.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. Big laugh at the claim of intel having a exceptionally low tolerance to risk when they're the only semi company left still running their own fabs, decades after AMD sold off their own for being too risky of a venture to keep running by themselves. And every fab company out there will vouch for how risky that line of business is. Even more so to pour billions into a business like this while knowing Samsung/TSMC might beat you. More correct would be that Intel has a low tolerance to risk for things that are way outside of their core competencies which have traditionally been designing X86 CPUs and fabbing them, and that's mostly it. I commend them for not giving up on advancing their fab nodes despite the massive issues and setbacks(they could have spun it off like AMD did), and for building the ARC GPUs and keep improving them despite low sales.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  I think Intel is living their Nokia moment, except their lunch will be eaten much more slowly by the competition
- burnte 3y ago
  They do this so often, buy a company, sell it a few years later. So weird.
  - lisper 3y ago
    Sometimes they don't even bother to sell it. In the case of Barefoot Networks, they bought it, spent three years developing the next-generation product, got it to within 80-90% of being ready for tapeout, and then just pulled the plug.
    - andrewia 3y ago
      One of my relatives is a high level Barefoot employee who was integrated into Intel leadership after the acquisition. I was told that it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs. It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot. Not that the founders and CEO care, they got their money! The whole thing definitely seems symptomatic of Intel's extreme caution. I wonder why they didn't apply the same caution when buying Barefoot. Intel obviously didn't have a great idea on how to leverage them. This is all in stark contrast to AMD buying Pensando, a company that my SO works for. It makes sense for AMD to acquire Pensando to expand their data center offerings and compete directly with Intel. I think AMD made a smart buy.
      - burnte 3y ago
        > it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs So insane. It's always better in invent the next big thing that changes the market than a competitor, even if it kills another product of your own.
      - lisper 3y ago
        I was a part-time contractor for Barefoot, and came along for the ride during the acquisition, so I have some first-hand knowledge of this. I am very much out of the managerial loop so I have no insight into the actual motives for killing the project, but I can tell you that at least one of the founders cared very much and fought tooth and nail to keep it alive. > It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot Acquiring companies in order to kill them is a horrible business practice but not unusual. The thing that makes no sense to me is why they kept it going for three years before killing it. If they bought it in order to kill it, they should have done that before spending another hundred million on it.
- 7speter 3y ago
  I don’t know I don’t have the credentials to be an engineer at Intel, but I think they know its a bad idea to end or spin off their foundry service, especially now that they have a new client that will know the ins and outs of their fabrication process.
  - nsteel 3y ago
    > will know the ins and outs of their fabrication process. What do you mean by this? When working with a fab you get to know their design rules and that's about it.
    - cma 3y ago
      I believe I've read that design rules give away parts of the process so usually you have to sign anexclusivity agreement not to work with another vendor for a while, or firewall teams that work with different vendors.
      - nsteel 3y ago
        I can't imagine what you could take from one place to another that isn't trivial if they've got to the point of being even able to provide the technology. In the grand scheme of things, these rules are relatively high level. There are NDAs but that's more about non-public roadmaps, timelines and specialised IP i.e. future things that a competitor could then have time to work towards. The point being, there's no world where a fab would worry about sharing their design rules.
        cma 3y ago
        This is old and not the one I read, but what I could find through search: > Engineers needed manufacturing process information to verify that designs were free from systematic yield limiters, but foundries were reluctant to distribute process information that could reveal best practices and trade secrets. Encryption enabled the protection of selected design rules, process data and other information while still giving customers the details they needed. > In this discussion, you must understand that the required protection is much more than just an obfuscation of rule definitions so they are no longer human readable. The process also includes the encryption of related files and control over all the outputs from the tool environment that provide information about any checks. https://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/technique/protecting-ip-collaborative-signoff-environment/ https://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/technique/protecti... The design rules themselves could yield info to competitors about what processes are being used in the upcoming gen.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  > I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. The FPGA vendor tools are a complete shit show and open source tools would be greatly welcomed - they're doing really well in the Lattice/ICE40 space but those are small FPGAs. But Altera and Xilinx don't seem at all inclined to encourage the development of open source alternatives.
  - chrsw 3y ago
    That's not where the money is. They don't care about hobbyists, startups or schools. In FPGA world is about big contracts, big design wins. Networking, defense, space, industrial control etc. It's why the design tools are so bad too: there's no reason for the FPGA vendors to invest in those tools when the design wins come from size and performance. In fact, giving customers an escape hatch from vendor lock in would be a Very Bad Idea.
    - UncleOxidant 3y ago
      Indeed. I was working at a startup doing some FPGA work about 10 years ago. We ran into several bugs in the Xilinx software. Initially we could submit bug reports, but about 6 months in Xilinx suddenly changed their policy and decreed that only tier 1 customers (definitely not us) could submit bugs - everyone else had to look for help on the forums. We spent a lot of our time just working around the bugs in their tools. At that point I determined that, though FPGA development was kind of fun and interesting, I would not go into a field where I was going to be dependent on such buggy software and went back to the software side (where pretty much all the development tools are open source and if you run into trouble you're going to be able to get help).
    - crote 3y ago
      It does beg the question whether this is simply a chicken-and-egg problem. When it is almost impossible to develop for, you only get big contracts because nobody else has the resources to design products for it. On the other hand, with good and free design tools the toy projects done by hobbyists and schools can serve as the catalyst for using it in medium-scale projects. There are plenty of applications imaginable for something like Intel's SmartNIC platform - but you're not going to see any of them unless tinkerers can get their hands on them.
- wslh 3y ago
  Side question, how do you see the future of Intel? Do you share the doom perspective or think that they continue to have opportunities ot catch up? Thanks!
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    The answer to that is the intersection of thousands of state of the art fab technical issues and management decisions. Recent hindsight with TSMC makes it look "easy", but it's incredibly uncertain simply due to the complexity and number of pieces that have to align.
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    My best guess is that Gelsinger is planning to eventually split the fabs into a separate corporation.
- opello 3y ago
  I actually went to see if the EE Journal article I saw on this back then was already posted here, but apparently not. https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fpga-group-as-an-independent-company-nine-years-after-buying-altera/ https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fp... I remember finding it rather funny at the time that Altera would go "full circle" so quickly.
- Thimothy 3y ago
  When Intel acquired Altera, they scrapped the old catalog of Altera FPGAs. A few corps I was working with, who had heavy lock in to Altera due to those FPGAs, got royally screwed (had to suddenly redesign, and re-certify a bunch of boards that they where selling to happy costumers). Of course they went with Xilinx at the redesign, because f*ck you, and it didn't hurt that the SoC offerings of Xilinx where very superior at the time. I don't think it was a cost reduction issue, Altera was selling those old FPGAs at a BIG markup. The amount of market I saw dissolve for Altera in a puff was incredible. To this day one of the most shortsighted corp decisions I have ever witnessed.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    yeah, FPGAs are commonly used in market segments which value long-term availability and support of components (>10 years at least). Definitely not something to churn like consumer CPUs.
vachina 3y ago
So what’re they gonna name it this time? Altera? Hope they kept the original documentations.
- shrewm 3y ago
  I'm thinking Ctrlera™.
  - krallja 3y ago
    I like how you think. Could tie into VR/metaverse hype by naming it after the Meta key, though.
1-6 3y ago
This was actually a bright-spot in Intel's lineup that had a chance to be a moonshot. I don't know why Intel is giving up this early especially when AMD acquired Xilinx recently. Is intel trying to emulate Nvidia? I don't think they should try to become another Nvidia. They should be building programmable AI chips with FPGA. Heck, LLMs are able to code Verilog. There are many many possibilities.
- tester756 3y ago
  Why "giving up"? It's just spinoff and their people are at executive levels
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > They should be building programmable AI chips with FPGA Eh, people have been saying this for over a decade, and I think that opportunity has passed. FPGAs are not going to beat GPUs anytime soon due to the software ecosystem (among other things), and ultimately they are not going to outrun ASICs that are now economically viable (especially in the embedded space).
  - crotchfire 3y ago
    > FPGAs are not going to beat GPUs anytime soon due to the software ecosystem Completely true as long as the chip companies stonewall open-source toolchains. If Xilinx or Altera published the bitstream format for their highest-volume high-end chip (i.e. one or two generations back from the bleeding edge) you'd see the effect on the entire AI space within twelve months. I'm not kidding. The interest in this kind of access from developers is enormous, and the problems in this space are extremely regular. There are massive opportunities for FPGAs to avoid spilling to DRAM or even to SRAM -- you have an ocean of tiny register-speed memories in LUTRAM mode. But it will never happen. And so FPGAs will continue to be trinkets for weapons manufacturers and not much else.
    - someguydave 3y ago
      If they adopt open-source tool chains Xilinx & Altera would be signing their own death-warrants. The hardware would be reproduced by third parties (the open source code would contain all you need to know to produce the chips) and it would become a commodity like DRAM. Profit margins for the incumbent companies would go to zero and the users would profit immensely. Instead, FPGAs are sold to big entities like governments and big corps who can throw bodies at the crappy toolchains until they produce what they want.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
This is sad news; I was hoping one day we'd see chips with substantial on-die FPGA fabrics, ideally in ways that we could program with open tools. This announcement makes that less likely.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Red Hat supported a lot of research into this and there's some really interesting stuff, but nothing that is very compelling for commercial use. What uses do you have in mind? To my mind the more interesting stuff are the PCIe FPGA boards like https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/u200.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/u200.h... One particularly interesting research project was using the FPGA fabric to remap addresses, allowing database tables to be "virtually" rearranged (eg. making a row-major data source into a column-major source for easier searching). https://disc.bu.edu/papers/edbt23-relational-memory https://disc.bu.edu/papers/edbt23-relational-memory https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14349.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14349.pdf
  - thereisnospork 3y ago
    As (very much) a layman I've hoped to see something like dynamic hardware acceleration. Eg for a game that has advanced hair simulation, or 3d sound simulation: reconfigure the fpga and offload the calculations. Maybe even more pedestrian things like fpga driven bullet tragectory physics might be implemented at the game engine level. More optimistically something along the lines of hands-off offloading, where if the scheduler sees enough of the same type of calculation (e.g sparse matrix multiplication) it can reconfigure the fpga and offload.
    - magicalhippo 3y ago
      I was thinking it would be a good fit for crypto. New algorithms could be implemented with better-than-software performance, constant-time algorithms could be ensured etc.
      - 3y ago
blackguardx 3y ago
This is pretty funny. Intel bought Altera, which forced AMD to buy Xilinx with all the zero interest rate money floating around. AMD's purchase of Xilinx made less sense because AMD is fabless, but Intel didn't end up doing anything with Altera. Its not clear if Altera even started using Intel fabs for its chips. AMD's Xilinx has been comparatively more successful, but I don't think that had anything to do with AMD. Maybe we can look forward to all the ZIRP semiconductor consolidations to unwind.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  The only "synergy" that has come from AMD-Xilinx is that AMD took a (relatively simple) DSP for machine learning that Xilinx had built and put it into their newer CPU lines. That's still better than Intel-Altera, which basically didn't integrate at all, despite having grandiose plans.
- kjs3 3y ago
  AMD's purchase of Xilinx made less sense because AMD is fabless Xilinx was fabless before the acquisition. I'm missing how that made less sense. with all the zero interest rate money floating around Hehe...as one of my finance-world pals said: "everyone's doing M&As like drunken sailors".
  - 0x457 3y ago
    Well, it "made" sense for intel because this allowed Altera to switch to Intel fabs. Not saying it's a huge strategic value or anything, just saying that's the difference.
    - kjs3 3y ago
      Altera switched to Intel fabs from TSMC in 2013, so yeah it makes sense for Intel to pick up the folks you don't have to do much to integrate into your manufacturing process. But AMD and Xilinx both already being fabless meant it was a wash...no process integration to be done.
1-6 3y ago
I hope Nvidia comes along and scoops up Altera. That will show Intel a lesson.
- ak217 3y ago
  Yeah, it's interesting to compare Nvidia's strategy to Intel's. I'm sure there are quite a few Nvidia projects that have been cancelled or even acquisitions liquidated, but they all seem to be small. Every significant part of Nvidia that I can remember is something they are committed to, sometimes over multiple decades, even when the market is not there and sales are near zero. This seems to come from actually having a consistent, stable long-term vision and buy-in all the way up to Jensen Huang serving as a driving force behind acquisitions and projects, unlike Intel where the driving force seems to be bean counting and market domination related. To give credit to Pat Gelsinger, his stated goal is to shed non-essential units and refocus on the fundamentals. But I'm not sure how well that's going.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    Part of this I'm sure is management style and culture (Nvidia famously has a very strong get-it-done-at-all-costs culture for example) but I think the reason these ventures were persisted is because the founder (Jensen Huang) is still CEO and controls the majority of the company. Intel now, without Andy Grove and the founders steering the culture[0] it seems there is no-one who is able to steer this ship past quarterly results anymore. AMD had suffered decades of mishaps and near bankruptcy to finally find competent leadership in recent years which turned the company. [0]: After all, one core virtue that Andy Grove had was "only the paranoid survive", which in context, was all about never getting too comfortable with your market position. Granted, they also engaged in many illegal practices as essentially a monopoly in the 90s. I guess they lost his second virtue of Competitive Mindset which as Grove saw it viewed competition as the key driver of innovation and progress. This was out the window by then, though I don't know if he was effectively leading the company by 96. He stepped down in 98, but he had health problems before that - eventually diagnosed with prostate cancer. This is all to say that Intel's culture is a mixed bag of unhealthy paranoia and being used to being #1 in their categories, which is all incoming executives and major shareholders see when they think Intel. There's no-one to faithfully steer the ship back to clear waters it seems
jonnycoder 3y ago
Every year Intel announces a new failure, and every year I feel more ashamed for having Intel as the bulk of my software engineering experience on my resume. I saw the signs when I was still there and attending quarterly updates. It felt like in one breath they admitted to missing the mobile boat and in another they said only gamers need dedicated/discrete powerful gpus.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Intel can and does produce phenomenal technical products. Their compilers and HPC toolsets have done enormous good. Their chips are second to none (or perhaps tied for first, depending on who you ask). They are not a shameful company. They are just yesterday's giant, and as such, are due for a Microsoft-like reinvention. Intel is my daily driver for gaming, due to it's incredible (but sadly cancelled) Extreme Compute Element form factor with its incredible customization. What they're struggling with is adapting to a changing world and to find new business centers. But this is a hardware/software world built on Intel, even if it changes daily.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Which intel chips are second to none, and by what metric?
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      Trying to be measured here: Depending on who you ask, you'll find that for gaming, AMD or Intel alternate pretty regularly on technical benchmarks. At the moment, AMD is most power efficient, on average, and can eek out higher overall benchmark performance (as of late 2023). Throughout 2023, AMD and Intel were both listed as "best" on Toms Hardware, PC Mag, etc etc https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-cpus-for-gaming https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-cpus-for-gaming For server marketshare, intel vastly dominates (80%?). For gaming marketshare, Intel still has 60-70% the marketshare. Even if it's a mixed bag, if given an Intel (or AMD) processor, there's no way I would throw it in the trash and if a current-gen chip, you can find things that either are better than the other with. Both are top-tier accomplishments. AMD has a signifigant fan-following though, which tends to distort the story a little.
trynumber9 3y ago
Intel bought Altera in 2015 when it still thought 10nm would be on time and an advanced node. That did not work out. The idea was to get a better FPGA and have more customers to justify fab build out expenses. Gelsinger more recently said he does not want to force products to be on Intel fabrication. Use Intel processes where it makes sense. No reason to push Altera FPGA to Intel 10/7/4. No reason to push NICs to Intel 10/7/4. And so on.
jasoneckert 3y ago
The first thing this reminded me of was when Intel got rid of StrongARM/XScale because they didn't think it would amount to much in the long run. Hopefully they don't regret this particular spinoff in the future.
- reachableceo 3y ago
  One would presume Intel will get a decent chunk of the stock in any IPO and capture the upside value. That does seem to be how these kind of deals are usually structured. Spinco is 60% owned by the parent or wherever.
lawlessone 3y ago
Ten years from now.. "Intel should have dominated this space but Xilinix etc got lucky"
somethoughts 3y ago
It'd be interesting if some of the funds from the sale will be used for AI software development to provide a better coordinated response to CUDA.
mardifoufs 3y ago
How's the FPGA market at the moment? Has Altera been able to keep up with Xilinx (or vice versa) under Intel ownership?
- 15155 3y ago
  Xilinx's toolchain and chip offerings are substantially better.
dboreham 3y ago
FPGAs have never made sense. They're way too expensive to use in volume. There's no practical use case for "cool, I can reprogram the chip in the field to implement different functionality". Nobody has figured out how to usefully integrate them with a CPU to make a low-volume SOC. CPUs became so fast that most applications don't need customer hardware. Regular gate arrays are cheaper and faster above minimal volume. They seem to only have been useful for prototyping and military applications (low volume and infinite budget).
- vatys 3y ago
  I see them used in pro/prosumer audio equipment, synthesizers, and effects, which is relatively low volume and medium-to-high budget. FPGAs (and CPLDs, µC+AFE, etc) are great for these applications because they have great capabilities you might otherwise need a pile of discrete components or a custom chip for, but it doesn’t make sense to design fully custom silicon if you’re only ever going to sell about 50-500 of something. So sure, prototyping and military, but there are other uses as well. But none of them are super high-volume because once you’re selling millions of something you should be designing your own chips.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > CPUs became so fast that most applications don't need customer hardware. When complicated realtime signal processing is to be done, FPGAs shine - in particular if there exists no DSP that is competitive for the task.
  - pezezin 3y ago
    This. I work at a research particle accelerator. All the hard real-time, super low-level signal processing and process control stuff is done on FPGAs, there is no other way around.
- Bluebirt 3y ago
  Consumer application and FPGAs are an oxymoron in itself. FPGAs are used in applications requiring special interfaces, special computing units or other custom requirements. If there is enough demand, SoCs are developed for these applications, but this is only useful in mid to high volume production. Areas like the ones you gave and many more are making heavy use of FPGAs. I work in medical for example. We are using custom designed chips for special detection purposes. But when it comes to data processing and interfacing with computers, we use FPGAs.
soulbadguy 3y ago
Large acquisition rarely seems to pan out well in the tech sector. Especially when big companies try to acquire their way into an adjacent market. Also some company seems to be significantly worst than other, MSFT/microsoft/Dell come to mind. My suspicion is those type of acquisition are mainly driven by C/executive level employee as way to hide the real struggle of the company. Is there a report analyzing bit tech acquisition say for the last 30 years, and they economical impact ? That would be an interesting read. Maybe it's time for a new form of regulation around acquisitions
Kon-Peki 3y ago
I take exception to the usage of the word "spinoff". Intel is selling a portion of Altera. If this was a true spinoff, Intel shareholders would get shares in the new entity. Intel needs the cash, so this is understandable.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  I know a Altera folks personally. From my understanding this is happening - new shares and all. They'll stay on Intel stock until the new entity is finalised (some time next year). Apparently the plan is to go private and create a new IPO 3 years from now like they did with Mobileye.
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    Right. In a true spinoff, there would be an event in which all Intel shareholders of record in the ex-date would receive a tax-free distribution of Y shares of the new entity for each Intel share owned. I’m being pedantic, I know
midtake 3y ago
I don't know if this is the common perception and I'm definitely a bit biased, but it seems like a bad sign for Intel. Without a paradigm shift I don't foresee anything improving for them. Their sales team must be insane though. I feel a bit "good riddance" about it too and wish ARM or RISC would become the standard for gaming and productivity (read: rendering, compiling, not Microsoft Word) PCs.
bfrog 3y ago
Maybe they will finally make vhdl 2008 a part of the lite edition and stop knee capping it. Maybe create some updated parts that better fit the middle price range area instead of solely focusing on mega agilex parts. Their competitors don't seem to do this sort of thing.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  Look up Agilex 5 and 3. Announced some time last year/early this year. Low to mid range devices. Early access customers are working on designs for 5 now.
  - bfrog 3y ago
    With quartus pro only?
    - Aromasin 3y ago
      To be confirmed officially: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/programmable/support-resources/design-software/devices-support.html#intelagilex%C2%AEseries https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/programmable... The rumour mill through the distributors suggests they will be available on standard though, as they're targeted at customer with lower cost centres.
sheepybloke 3y ago
Maybe I'm too stuck in my own sector, but I haven't seen an Altera FPGA in the wild in forever. All the Altera FPGA's I've seen are over 10 years old, and anything newer is a Xilinx FPGA. Granted, my field has moved purely to MPSoC's, but it's crazy to me that I've never seen a Altera FPGA even in the conversation.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  Counter point to this, we use them almost exclusively. Their Agilex 7 and Stratix 10 devices make up most of the compute on our acceleration cards. The fact they have market ready CXL IP when no one else does has been a recent win for us. We work closely with Microsoft, and they use mainly Intel/Altera too.

139 points by ChuckMcM 3y ago

Apparently they announced this in October. They are kicking Altera, which they acquired for 16.7 billion back out into the world to live or die on its own. Which feels a bit weird given what feels like AMD's relative success with Xilinx. It also dampens their "US developed" technology pitch (which they had been pushing pretty hard vs other solutions that were fabbed at TSMC) I wonder if they will also give up on their third party use of their fabs. Intel was the first "real" job I ever had and it was during Andy Grove's tenure as CEO and his "paranoid" attitude was really pervasive. I had been working on graphics chip which were the next big thing until the chip recession and then they weren't. And it followed a long series of Intel sending out tendrils outside its core microcomputer (eventually x86/x51 only) winners only to snap them back at the first sign of challenges. I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win.

AceJohnny2 3y ago
> I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win. Tragically, I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, I'd be shocked if that were to happen.
AceJohnny2 3y ago
> only to snap them back at the first sign of challenges. It's really quite impressive how bad Intel's track record has been. Would you say it's a broad cultural problem within Intel? Bad incentives? (I'b be interested if someone could come up with a list of all of Intel's failed ventures. StrongARM, Optane, Altera... Obviously some of these are par for the course for such a large company as Intel, but Intel still seems to stand out) (I know one reason Apple is so secretive about its ventures is because it knows many of them won't pan out, and it knows that due to its size anything it does has huge repercussions, and wants to avoid that)
- 1-6 3y ago
  When Intel does something like this, it reveals how tight their operating margin is. This is not a good sign. Intel has never been able to push away from the fact that they'll always be a hardware first company. It's a very tight market out there. TSMC was able to make it with very tight partnerships with OEMs and I doubt Intel can pull off something like that.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  I agree with 1-6 that they have always been really focused on their margins, they were never a company that wanted to go into debt for something that was 'unproven.' They have had lots of things they stopped doing, the graphics chip I was involved in (82786) was one, the speech chips, the iAPX431, the modem chips, their digital watch was an early one. I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. When I was their the 386 had just fabbed and I was one of the people watching when the very first chip was powered up and it actually worked (which amazed pretty much everyone). Sun Microsystems was a little startup in Mountain View using the 68000 and getting some traction I suggested to Intel that if they used the graphic chip I was working on and the 386 they could build an Intel branded "Workstation" and both replace the VAXStations they were using for CAD work internally and sell them as part of Intel's initiative to become a "systems company." I got a response to my memo[1] from Dave House who was later CEO but at the time just the head of Microprocessor Operation (MIPO) Marketing explaining to this lowly NCG (new college grad) that Workstations were not much of a market and Intel was only interested in pursuing the "big" opportunities. Six months later I joined Sun (just after they IPO'd sadly) and didn't look back. :-) [1] Yes memo, as in typed up and printed out and put in a manilla envelope where on the last line of the front had it coming from Dave and being addressed to me. And yes, it started as a memo I had printed out and given to my manager because while Intel had "heard" of electronic mail they preferred the "durability" of actual mail and forcing people to use actual mail cut down on "frivolous" communications.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. Big laugh at the claim of intel having a exceptionally low tolerance to risk when they're the only semi company left still running their own fabs, decades after AMD sold off their own for being too risky of a venture to keep running by themselves. And every fab company out there will vouch for how risky that line of business is. Even more so to pour billions into a business like this while knowing Samsung/TSMC might beat you. More correct would be that Intel has a low tolerance to risk for things that are way outside of their core competencies which have traditionally been designing X86 CPUs and fabbing them, and that's mostly it. I commend them for not giving up on advancing their fab nodes despite the massive issues and setbacks(they could have spun it off like AMD did), and for building the ARC GPUs and keep improving them despite low sales.
raverbashing 3y ago
I think Intel is living their Nokia moment, except their lunch will be eaten much more slowly by the competition
burnte 3y ago
They do this so often, buy a company, sell it a few years later. So weird.
- lisper 3y ago
  Sometimes they don't even bother to sell it. In the case of Barefoot Networks, they bought it, spent three years developing the next-generation product, got it to within 80-90% of being ready for tapeout, and then just pulled the plug.
  - andrewia 3y ago
    One of my relatives is a high level Barefoot employee who was integrated into Intel leadership after the acquisition. I was told that it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs. It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot. Not that the founders and CEO care, they got their money! The whole thing definitely seems symptomatic of Intel's extreme caution. I wonder why they didn't apply the same caution when buying Barefoot. Intel obviously didn't have a great idea on how to leverage them. This is all in stark contrast to AMD buying Pensando, a company that my SO works for. It makes sense for AMD to acquire Pensando to expand their data center offerings and compete directly with Intel. I think AMD made a smart buy.
    - burnte 3y ago
      > it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs So insane. It's always better in invent the next big thing that changes the market than a competitor, even if it kills another product of your own.
    - lisper 3y ago
      I was a part-time contractor for Barefoot, and came along for the ride during the acquisition, so I have some first-hand knowledge of this. I am very much out of the managerial loop so I have no insight into the actual motives for killing the project, but I can tell you that at least one of the founders cared very much and fought tooth and nail to keep it alive. > It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot Acquiring companies in order to kill them is a horrible business practice but not unusual. The thing that makes no sense to me is why they kept it going for three years before killing it. If they bought it in order to kill it, they should have done that before spending another hundred million on it.
7speter 3y ago
I don’t know I don’t have the credentials to be an engineer at Intel, but I think they know its a bad idea to end or spin off their foundry service, especially now that they have a new client that will know the ins and outs of their fabrication process.
- nsteel 3y ago
  > will know the ins and outs of their fabrication process. What do you mean by this? When working with a fab you get to know their design rules and that's about it.
  - cma 3y ago
    I believe I've read that design rules give away parts of the process so usually you have to sign anexclusivity agreement not to work with another vendor for a while, or firewall teams that work with different vendors.
    - nsteel 3y ago
      I can't imagine what you could take from one place to another that isn't trivial if they've got to the point of being even able to provide the technology. In the grand scheme of things, these rules are relatively high level. There are NDAs but that's more about non-public roadmaps, timelines and specialised IP i.e. future things that a competitor could then have time to work towards. The point being, there's no world where a fab would worry about sharing their design rules.
      - cma 3y ago
        This is old and not the one I read, but what I could find through search: > Engineers needed manufacturing process information to verify that designs were free from systematic yield limiters, but foundries were reluctant to distribute process information that could reveal best practices and trade secrets. Encryption enabled the protection of selected design rules, process data and other information while still giving customers the details they needed. > In this discussion, you must understand that the required protection is much more than just an obfuscation of rule definitions so they are no longer human readable. The process also includes the encryption of related files and control over all the outputs from the tool environment that provide information about any checks. https://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/technique/protecting-ip-collaborative-signoff-environment/ https://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/technique/protecti... The design rules themselves could yield info to competitors about what processes are being used in the upcoming gen.
UncleOxidant 3y ago
> I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. The FPGA vendor tools are a complete shit show and open source tools would be greatly welcomed - they're doing really well in the Lattice/ICE40 space but those are small FPGAs. But Altera and Xilinx don't seem at all inclined to encourage the development of open source alternatives.
- chrsw 3y ago
  That's not where the money is. They don't care about hobbyists, startups or schools. In FPGA world is about big contracts, big design wins. Networking, defense, space, industrial control etc. It's why the design tools are so bad too: there's no reason for the FPGA vendors to invest in those tools when the design wins come from size and performance. In fact, giving customers an escape hatch from vendor lock in would be a Very Bad Idea.
  - UncleOxidant 3y ago
    Indeed. I was working at a startup doing some FPGA work about 10 years ago. We ran into several bugs in the Xilinx software. Initially we could submit bug reports, but about 6 months in Xilinx suddenly changed their policy and decreed that only tier 1 customers (definitely not us) could submit bugs - everyone else had to look for help on the forums. We spent a lot of our time just working around the bugs in their tools. At that point I determined that, though FPGA development was kind of fun and interesting, I would not go into a field where I was going to be dependent on such buggy software and went back to the software side (where pretty much all the development tools are open source and if you run into trouble you're going to be able to get help).
  - crote 3y ago
    It does beg the question whether this is simply a chicken-and-egg problem. When it is almost impossible to develop for, you only get big contracts because nobody else has the resources to design products for it. On the other hand, with good and free design tools the toy projects done by hobbyists and schools can serve as the catalyst for using it in medium-scale projects. There are plenty of applications imaginable for something like Intel's SmartNIC platform - but you're not going to see any of them unless tinkerers can get their hands on them.
wslh 3y ago
Side question, how do you see the future of Intel? Do you share the doom perspective or think that they continue to have opportunities ot catch up? Thanks!
- ethbr1 3y ago
  The answer to that is the intersection of thousands of state of the art fab technical issues and management decisions. Recent hindsight with TSMC makes it look "easy", but it's incredibly uncertain simply due to the complexity and number of pieces that have to align.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  My best guess is that Gelsinger is planning to eventually split the fabs into a separate corporation.
opello 3y ago
I actually went to see if the EE Journal article I saw on this back then was already posted here, but apparently not. https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fpga-group-as-an-independent-company-nine-years-after-buying-altera/ https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fp... I remember finding it rather funny at the time that Altera would go "full circle" so quickly.
Thimothy 3y ago
When Intel acquired Altera, they scrapped the old catalog of Altera FPGAs. A few corps I was working with, who had heavy lock in to Altera due to those FPGAs, got royally screwed (had to suddenly redesign, and re-certify a bunch of boards that they where selling to happy costumers). Of course they went with Xilinx at the redesign, because f*ck you, and it didn't hurt that the SoC offerings of Xilinx where very superior at the time. I don't think it was a cost reduction issue, Altera was selling those old FPGAs at a BIG markup. The amount of market I saw dissolve for Altera in a puff was incredible. To this day one of the most shortsighted corp decisions I have ever witnessed.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  yeah, FPGAs are commonly used in market segments which value long-term availability and support of components (>10 years at least). Definitely not something to churn like consumer CPUs.

vachina 3y ago

So what’re they gonna name it this time? Altera? Hope they kept the original documentations.

shrewm 3y ago
I'm thinking Ctrlera™.
- krallja 3y ago
  I like how you think. Could tie into VR/metaverse hype by naming it after the Meta key, though.

1-6 3y ago

This was actually a bright-spot in Intel's lineup that had a chance to be a moonshot. I don't know why Intel is giving up this early especially when AMD acquired Xilinx recently. Is intel trying to emulate Nvidia? I don't think they should try to become another Nvidia. They should be building programmable AI chips with FPGA. Heck, LLMs are able to code Verilog. There are many many possibilities.

tester756 3y ago
Why "giving up"? It's just spinoff and their people are at executive levels
brucethemoose2 3y ago
> They should be building programmable AI chips with FPGA Eh, people have been saying this for over a decade, and I think that opportunity has passed. FPGAs are not going to beat GPUs anytime soon due to the software ecosystem (among other things), and ultimately they are not going to outrun ASICs that are now economically viable (especially in the embedded space).
- crotchfire 3y ago
  > FPGAs are not going to beat GPUs anytime soon due to the software ecosystem Completely true as long as the chip companies stonewall open-source toolchains. If Xilinx or Altera published the bitstream format for their highest-volume high-end chip (i.e. one or two generations back from the bleeding edge) you'd see the effect on the entire AI space within twelve months. I'm not kidding. The interest in this kind of access from developers is enormous, and the problems in this space are extremely regular. There are massive opportunities for FPGAs to avoid spilling to DRAM or even to SRAM -- you have an ocean of tiny register-speed memories in LUTRAM mode. But it will never happen. And so FPGAs will continue to be trinkets for weapons manufacturers and not much else.
  - someguydave 3y ago
    If they adopt open-source tool chains Xilinx & Altera would be signing their own death-warrants. The hardware would be reproduced by third parties (the open source code would contain all you need to know to produce the chips) and it would become a commodity like DRAM. Profit margins for the incumbent companies would go to zero and the users would profit immensely. Instead, FPGAs are sold to big entities like governments and big corps who can throw bodies at the crappy toolchains until they produce what they want.

JoshTriplett 3y ago

This is sad news; I was hoping one day we'd see chips with substantial on-die FPGA fabrics, ideally in ways that we could program with open tools. This announcement makes that less likely.

rwmj 3y ago
Red Hat supported a lot of research into this and there's some really interesting stuff, but nothing that is very compelling for commercial use. What uses do you have in mind? To my mind the more interesting stuff are the PCIe FPGA boards like https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/u200.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/u200.h... One particularly interesting research project was using the FPGA fabric to remap addresses, allowing database tables to be "virtually" rearranged (eg. making a row-major data source into a column-major source for easier searching). https://disc.bu.edu/papers/edbt23-relational-memory https://disc.bu.edu/papers/edbt23-relational-memory https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14349.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14349.pdf
- thereisnospork 3y ago
  As (very much) a layman I've hoped to see something like dynamic hardware acceleration. Eg for a game that has advanced hair simulation, or 3d sound simulation: reconfigure the fpga and offload the calculations. Maybe even more pedestrian things like fpga driven bullet tragectory physics might be implemented at the game engine level. More optimistically something along the lines of hands-off offloading, where if the scheduler sees enough of the same type of calculation (e.g sparse matrix multiplication) it can reconfigure the fpga and offload.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    I was thinking it would be a good fit for crypto. New algorithms could be implemented with better-than-software performance, constant-time algorithms could be ensured etc.
    - 3y ago

blackguardx 3y ago

This is pretty funny. Intel bought Altera, which forced AMD to buy Xilinx with all the zero interest rate money floating around. AMD's purchase of Xilinx made less sense because AMD is fabless, but Intel didn't end up doing anything with Altera. Its not clear if Altera even started using Intel fabs for its chips. AMD's Xilinx has been comparatively more successful, but I don't think that had anything to do with AMD. Maybe we can look forward to all the ZIRP semiconductor consolidations to unwind.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pclmulqdq 3y ago
The only "synergy" that has come from AMD-Xilinx is that AMD took a (relatively simple) DSP for machine learning that Xilinx had built and put it into their newer CPU lines. That's still better than Intel-Altera, which basically didn't integrate at all, despite having grandiose plans.
kjs3 3y ago
AMD's purchase of Xilinx made less sense because AMD is fabless Xilinx was fabless before the acquisition. I'm missing how that made less sense. with all the zero interest rate money floating around Hehe...as one of my finance-world pals said: "everyone's doing M&As like drunken sailors".
- 0x457 3y ago
  Well, it "made" sense for intel because this allowed Altera to switch to Intel fabs. Not saying it's a huge strategic value or anything, just saying that's the difference.
  - kjs3 3y ago
    Altera switched to Intel fabs from TSMC in 2013, so yeah it makes sense for Intel to pick up the folks you don't have to do much to integrate into your manufacturing process. But AMD and Xilinx both already being fabless meant it was a wash...no process integration to be done.

1-6 3y ago

I hope Nvidia comes along and scoops up Altera. That will show Intel a lesson.

ak217 3y ago
Yeah, it's interesting to compare Nvidia's strategy to Intel's. I'm sure there are quite a few Nvidia projects that have been cancelled or even acquisitions liquidated, but they all seem to be small. Every significant part of Nvidia that I can remember is something they are committed to, sometimes over multiple decades, even when the market is not there and sales are near zero. This seems to come from actually having a consistent, stable long-term vision and buy-in all the way up to Jensen Huang serving as a driving force behind acquisitions and projects, unlike Intel where the driving force seems to be bean counting and market domination related. To give credit to Pat Gelsinger, his stated goal is to shed non-essential units and refocus on the fundamentals. But I'm not sure how well that's going.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Part of this I'm sure is management style and culture (Nvidia famously has a very strong get-it-done-at-all-costs culture for example) but I think the reason these ventures were persisted is because the founder (Jensen Huang) is still CEO and controls the majority of the company. Intel now, without Andy Grove and the founders steering the culture[0] it seems there is no-one who is able to steer this ship past quarterly results anymore. AMD had suffered decades of mishaps and near bankruptcy to finally find competent leadership in recent years which turned the company. [0]: After all, one core virtue that Andy Grove had was "only the paranoid survive", which in context, was all about never getting too comfortable with your market position. Granted, they also engaged in many illegal practices as essentially a monopoly in the 90s. I guess they lost his second virtue of Competitive Mindset which as Grove saw it viewed competition as the key driver of innovation and progress. This was out the window by then, though I don't know if he was effectively leading the company by 96. He stepped down in 98, but he had health problems before that - eventually diagnosed with prostate cancer. This is all to say that Intel's culture is a mixed bag of unhealthy paranoia and being used to being #1 in their categories, which is all incoming executives and major shareholders see when they think Intel. There's no-one to faithfully steer the ship back to clear waters it seems

jonnycoder 3y ago

Every year Intel announces a new failure, and every year I feel more ashamed for having Intel as the bulk of my software engineering experience on my resume. I saw the signs when I was still there and attending quarterly updates. It felt like in one breath they admitted to missing the mobile boat and in another they said only gamers need dedicated/discrete powerful gpus.

jvanderbot 3y ago
Intel can and does produce phenomenal technical products. Their compilers and HPC toolsets have done enormous good. Their chips are second to none (or perhaps tied for first, depending on who you ask). They are not a shameful company. They are just yesterday's giant, and as such, are due for a Microsoft-like reinvention. Intel is my daily driver for gaming, due to it's incredible (but sadly cancelled) Extreme Compute Element form factor with its incredible customization. What they're struggling with is adapting to a changing world and to find new business centers. But this is a hardware/software world built on Intel, even if it changes daily.
- hedora 3y ago
  Which intel chips are second to none, and by what metric?
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Trying to be measured here: Depending on who you ask, you'll find that for gaming, AMD or Intel alternate pretty regularly on technical benchmarks. At the moment, AMD is most power efficient, on average, and can eek out higher overall benchmark performance (as of late 2023). Throughout 2023, AMD and Intel were both listed as "best" on Toms Hardware, PC Mag, etc etc https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-cpus-for-gaming https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-cpus-for-gaming For server marketshare, intel vastly dominates (80%?). For gaming marketshare, Intel still has 60-70% the marketshare. Even if it's a mixed bag, if given an Intel (or AMD) processor, there's no way I would throw it in the trash and if a current-gen chip, you can find things that either are better than the other with. Both are top-tier accomplishments. AMD has a signifigant fan-following though, which tends to distort the story a little.

trynumber9 3y ago

Intel bought Altera in 2015 when it still thought 10nm would be on time and an advanced node. That did not work out. The idea was to get a better FPGA and have more customers to justify fab build out expenses. Gelsinger more recently said he does not want to force products to be on Intel fabrication. Use Intel processes where it makes sense. No reason to push Altera FPGA to Intel 10/7/4. No reason to push NICs to Intel 10/7/4. And so on.

jasoneckert 3y ago

The first thing this reminded me of was when Intel got rid of StrongARM/XScale because they didn't think it would amount to much in the long run. Hopefully they don't regret this particular spinoff in the future.

reachableceo 3y ago
One would presume Intel will get a decent chunk of the stock in any IPO and capture the upside value. That does seem to be how these kind of deals are usually structured. Spinco is 60% owned by the parent or wherever.

lawlessone 3y ago

Ten years from now.. "Intel should have dominated this space but Xilinix etc got lucky"

somethoughts 3y ago

It'd be interesting if some of the funds from the sale will be used for AI software development to provide a better coordinated response to CUDA.

mardifoufs 3y ago

How's the FPGA market at the moment? Has Altera been able to keep up with Xilinx (or vice versa) under Intel ownership?

15155 3y ago
Xilinx's toolchain and chip offerings are substantially better.

dboreham 3y ago

FPGAs have never made sense. They're way too expensive to use in volume. There's no practical use case for "cool, I can reprogram the chip in the field to implement different functionality". Nobody has figured out how to usefully integrate them with a CPU to make a low-volume SOC. CPUs became so fast that most applications don't need customer hardware. Regular gate arrays are cheaper and faster above minimal volume. They seem to only have been useful for prototyping and military applications (low volume and infinite budget).

vatys 3y ago
I see them used in pro/prosumer audio equipment, synthesizers, and effects, which is relatively low volume and medium-to-high budget. FPGAs (and CPLDs, µC+AFE, etc) are great for these applications because they have great capabilities you might otherwise need a pile of discrete components or a custom chip for, but it doesn’t make sense to design fully custom silicon if you’re only ever going to sell about 50-500 of something. So sure, prototyping and military, but there are other uses as well. But none of them are super high-volume because once you’re selling millions of something you should be designing your own chips.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> CPUs became so fast that most applications don't need customer hardware. When complicated realtime signal processing is to be done, FPGAs shine - in particular if there exists no DSP that is competitive for the task.
- pezezin 3y ago
  This. I work at a research particle accelerator. All the hard real-time, super low-level signal processing and process control stuff is done on FPGAs, there is no other way around.
Bluebirt 3y ago
Consumer application and FPGAs are an oxymoron in itself. FPGAs are used in applications requiring special interfaces, special computing units or other custom requirements. If there is enough demand, SoCs are developed for these applications, but this is only useful in mid to high volume production. Areas like the ones you gave and many more are making heavy use of FPGAs. I work in medical for example. We are using custom designed chips for special detection purposes. But when it comes to data processing and interfacing with computers, we use FPGAs.

soulbadguy 3y ago

Large acquisition rarely seems to pan out well in the tech sector. Especially when big companies try to acquire their way into an adjacent market. Also some company seems to be significantly worst than other, MSFT/microsoft/Dell come to mind. My suspicion is those type of acquisition are mainly driven by C/executive level employee as way to hide the real struggle of the company. Is there a report analyzing bit tech acquisition say for the last 30 years, and they economical impact ? That would be an interesting read. Maybe it's time for a new form of regulation around acquisitions

Kon-Peki 3y ago

I take exception to the usage of the word "spinoff". Intel is selling a portion of Altera. If this was a true spinoff, Intel shareholders would get shares in the new entity. Intel needs the cash, so this is understandable.

Aromasin 3y ago
I know a Altera folks personally. From my understanding this is happening - new shares and all. They'll stay on Intel stock until the new entity is finalised (some time next year). Apparently the plan is to go private and create a new IPO 3 years from now like they did with Mobileye.
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  Right. In a true spinoff, there would be an event in which all Intel shareholders of record in the ex-date would receive a tax-free distribution of Y shares of the new entity for each Intel share owned. I’m being pedantic, I know

midtake 3y ago

I don't know if this is the common perception and I'm definitely a bit biased, but it seems like a bad sign for Intel. Without a paradigm shift I don't foresee anything improving for them. Their sales team must be insane though. I feel a bit "good riddance" about it too and wish ARM or RISC would become the standard for gaming and productivity (read: rendering, compiling, not Microsoft Word) PCs.

bfrog 3y ago

Maybe they will finally make vhdl 2008 a part of the lite edition and stop knee capping it. Maybe create some updated parts that better fit the middle price range area instead of solely focusing on mega agilex parts. Their competitors don't seem to do this sort of thing.

Aromasin 3y ago
Look up Agilex 5 and 3. Announced some time last year/early this year. Low to mid range devices. Early access customers are working on designs for 5 now.
- bfrog 3y ago
  With quartus pro only?
  - Aromasin 3y ago
    To be confirmed officially: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/programmable/support-resources/design-software/devices-support.html#intelagilex%C2%AEseries https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/programmable... The rumour mill through the distributors suggests they will be available on standard though, as they're targeted at customer with lower cost centres.

sheepybloke 3y ago

Maybe I'm too stuck in my own sector, but I haven't seen an Altera FPGA in the wild in forever. All the Altera FPGA's I've seen are over 10 years old, and anything newer is a Xilinx FPGA. Granted, my field has moved purely to MPSoC's, but it's crazy to me that I've never seen a Altera FPGA even in the conversation.

Aromasin 3y ago
Counter point to this, we use them almost exclusively. Their Agilex 7 and Stratix 10 devices make up most of the compute on our acceleration cards. The fact they have market ready CXL IP when no one else does has been a recent win for us. We work closely with Microsoft, and they use mainly Intel/Altera too.