Intel plans spinoff of FPGA unit

https://www.networkworld.com/article/957338/intel-plans-spinoff-of-fpga-unit.html

by ChuckMcM • 3 years ago

139 161 3 years ago

ChuckMcM2• 3 years 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.

AceJohnny22• 3 years 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)

1-63• 3 years 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.

ChuckMcM2• 3 years 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.

drjasonharrison• 3 years ago

Wikipedia has a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... what it is missing is the eventual disposition of the acquisition (product brought to market, unit pushed out, unit closed down, ...).

AceJohnny22• 3 years 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.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

I think Intel is living their Nokia moment, except their lunch will be eaten much more slowly by the competition

burnte2• 3 years ago

They do this so often, buy a company, sell it a few years later. So weird.

lisper3• 3 years 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.

7speter• 3 years 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.

nsteel2• 3 years 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.

UncleOxidant2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

phkahler2• 3 years ago

> 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.

Thanks for the stock tip. The size of a chip can change, and will. Stupidity really tends not to. Great dev tools are incredibly important, and the people using them actually can influence decisions on which parts to use.

wslh• 3 years 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!

ethbr13• 3 years 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.

CoastalCoder3• 3 years ago

My best guess is that Gelsinger is planning to eventually split the fabs into a separate corporation.

opello• 3 years 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-fp...

I remember finding it rather funny at the time that Altera would go "full circle" so quickly.

Thimothy• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

shrewm• 3 years ago

I'm thinking Ctrlera™.

krallja• 3 years ago

I like how you think. Could tie into VR/metaverse hype by naming it after the Meta key, though.

1-63• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Why "giving up"?

It's just spinoff and their people are at executive levels

brucethemoose2• 3 years 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).

crotchfire2• 3 years 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.

btown• 3 years ago

Now I'm wondering about a world where OpenAI can treat their compute not as "dedicate this time slice of an A100 to generating tokens for customer A's query" but rather "there is a custom pipeline at a gate level that exactly matches our model architecture, hardcoding weights at the gate level, and can treat parallel requests the same way a processor would pipeline instructions." I don't think any human could write the TensorFlow compiler for this, but theoretically a generative AI could learn how to, experimenting on its own compute hardware? I don't know that we've seen the last of FPGAs.

MBCook• 3 years ago

They gave up on Xscale right before mobile demand shot to the moon.

contrarian1234• 3 years ago

They acquired Altera in 2015, which in the tech world is when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. How much more time would they need to see a profitable synergy? Bearing in mind they can probably see what's in the pipeline for the next couple of years.

I'm not an expert... But in my naiive opinion it seems entirely reasonable to expect an acquisition to start paying off within ten years?

Would love to hear counterexamples

crote3• 3 years ago

A big issue is that sticking an FPGA onto the CPU die itself doesn't really make sense. Those are some really expensive transistors, and you're essentially wasting them when they are not being used for cores or cache. Besides, you'd be spending significant amounts of money building a niche product.

It would be a lot more viable to use a chiplet approach: bake the FPGAs on a slightly-cheaper node, and just glue them right next to the CPU itself. Unfortunately Intel is still miles behind AMD when it comes to chiplets, and their tech is only just now barely starting to ship.

adrr• 3 years ago

Because intel messes up everything with their bureaucracy. Look at the NUC, they made it extremely hard to get because of their convoluted distribution strategy. They could have easily done direct to consumer and made it easy to get.

Till they fix their culture problem, they should be unloading these business units and profit by holding majority stakes in them.

JoshTriplett2• 3 years 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.

rwmj2• 3 years 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.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://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14349.pdf

thereisnospork• 3 years 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.

JoshTriplett2• 3 years ago

What uses do you have in mind?

Acceleration of new hashing and cryptographic algorithms, new compression algorithms, new codecs, and many other similar things, without adding special-purpose instructions for them.

Implementation of fast virtual peripherals. Accurate emulation of special-purpose hardware.

Implementation of acceleration modules for well-established software. Imagine if popular libraries or databases or other engines didn't just come with acceleration using SIMD and other instruction sets, they also came with modules loadable on an attached FPGA if you have one.

rkagerer• 3 years ago

Anything where you need cycle-perfect timing.

imtringued4• 3 years ago

I honestly have more hope for cheap effinix FPGAs driving one of those 5 Gbps FTDI chips to get 400MB/s at a price that doesn't break an arm and a leg. (Custom PCB design for less than 100€)

Laaas• 3 years ago

The new Ryzen chips already have this as "XDNA" AFAIU

wmf• 3 years ago

XDNA is not an FPGA.

wtallis• 3 years ago

I think that's just a neural accelerator, not an FPGA. The IP block happens to be from the Xilinx side of the company.

blackguardx• 3 years 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.

pclmulqdq• 3 years 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.

kjs33• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

Tuna-Fish2• 3 years ago

It's funnier than you think.

Intel marketing built the market of x86 server + tightly integrated FPGA. Large customers built products based on their promises. Then they didn't deliver.

Then AMD bought Xilinx and started shipping to the market.

imtringued4• 3 years ago

The irony is that Xilinx is better at AI than AMD.

151552• 3 years ago

AMD and Xilinx both use newer TSMC nodes?

1-63• 3 years ago

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

ak2172• 3 years 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_wizard2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

jvanderbot4• 3 years 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.

hedora2• 3 years ago

Which intel chips are second to none, and by what metric?

kouteiheika• 3 years ago

Their chips are second to none (or perhaps tied for first, depending on who you ask).

No. They're definitely behind AMD. AMD has significantly better power efficiency[1], better performance in gaming for most of the titles[2], and vastly more cores and better multithreaded performance (with Threadrippers[3]).

[1] https://gamersnexus.net/megacharts/cpu-power

[2] https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/intels-300w-core-i9-14900k-cpu-...

[3] https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/best-cpus-2023-intel-vs-amd-gam...

bee_rider• 3 years ago

Intel’s engineering is pretty solid, I think anyone who looks down on Intel’s engineers because they “only” managed to overcome their management’s wasteful dithering for… like… 30 years is not worth working for.

kjs33• 3 years ago

That's a pretty personal take; don't take that shame on yourself. Stick to the usual, comfortingly impersonal "Obviously, Intel is dead and buried and all their management sucks and they ruined the world" whenever Intel has announced a setback any time in the last 50 years. No one has a blanket "we don't hire losers from Intel" policy; it's not like you worked at CA or Oracle.

boshalfoshal• 3 years ago

These sound largely like management/product direction issues and is not really indicitive of bad engineering quality. I wouldn't be concerned about the quality of your resume.

lvl102• 3 years ago

It wasn’t long ago that Intel internship was the gold standard. They launched a lot of careers. We should cherish Intel for their golden years.

trynumber9• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Ten years from now..

"Intel should have dominated this space but Xilinix etc got lucky"

somethoughts• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

151552• 3 years ago

Xilinx's toolchain and chip offerings are substantially better.

dboreham• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

crotchfire2• 3 years ago

The problem is that FPGA companies are really CAD tool companies who see their chips as copy-protection/payment-assurance schemes for their software.

Unfortunately their CAD tools suck, but that's beside the point.

imtringued4• 3 years ago

You somehow managed to write a post where every single sentence is absolutely wrong. FPGAs clearly make sense for prototyping ASICs. That alone makes FPGAs make sense even if it is a tiny niche market. After all, the budget of ASIC companies is big. A few hundred FPGAs for developers are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of an ASIC.

Too expensive in volume only applies to Xilinx and Altera and with every node shrink, the amount of designs that fit on an FPGA grow while the non recurrent development costs grow for ASICs. Due to this, the maximum volume at which FPGAs remain cost competitive keeps growing with every generation.

Smart NICs make extensive use of reconfiguration because things such as protocols are not set in stone. They can change all the time. It is also possible to build designs that make extensive use of partial reconfiguration.

MPSoCs have been a thing for a long time. If you want to get into those Google Kria 260 and you will be pleasantly surprised.

When I take a look at Effinix FPGAs those are designed specifically for vision applications and massive amounts of I/O. A CPU would struggle with multiple camera streams and consume too much power.

Yeah ok but an 100k LUT FPGA Chip from Effinix costs what? 25€? You're going to need a really high volume to get an overall cost saving. 40000 FPGAs is only a million dollars. The masks of an 22nm ASIC cost 1.5 million dollars without the rest of the development costs.

And finally your last sentence contradicts the first. Next time stick with a story.

soulbadguy5• 3 years 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-Peki2• 3 years 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.

Aromasin4• 3 years 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-Peki2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

bfrog2• 3 years 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.

Aromasin4• 3 years 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.

bfrog2• 3 years ago

With quartus pro only?

sheepybloke• 3 years 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.

Aromasin4• 3 years 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.

Intel plans spinoff of FPGA unit

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