Intel announced today that it is reviving the Altera brand name for its new standalone FPGA (field-programmable gate array) company. The business was previously known as Intel's Programmable Solutions Group before being spun off into an independent entity two months ago. The chipmaking giant acquired Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion to bolster its FPGA capabilities. Using the well-known Altera moniker for the new standalone company signals Intel's confidence in the FPGA market opportunity, which it estimates to be over $55 billion across data centers, communications, and embedded segments. As a standalone company with its own board of directors, Altera will be able to focus exclusively on the FPGA market. Intel will remain a majority shareholder, but outside investment could help fund expansion plans.

Altera plans to build on the Programmable Solutions Group's recent efforts targeting lower-end and mid-range FPGAs for embedded devices in industrial, automotive and aerospace/defense applications. According to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, independence will give Altera "the mandate, focus and resources to better capitalize on the attractive expected growth of FPGAs." The revival of the Altera brand and refocus on the FPGA market comes alongside Intel's plan to invest heavily in new chip factories and advanced manufacturing capabilities. With Altera as a standalone business, Intel aims to be a significant player in the expected high growth of the global FPGA industry. Alongside new naming, Altera is introducing Agilex 9, which is now in volume production; Agilex 7 F-series and I-series released to production; Agilex 5 now broadly available, and Agilex 3 coming soon, with functions for cloud, communications and intelligent edge applications. Below, you can see the specification table of the upcoming FPGAs.

Ayar Labs, a leader in silicon photonics for chip-to-chip connectivity, will showcase its in-package optical I/O solution integrated with Intel's industry-leading Agilex Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. In demonstrating 5x current industry bandwidth at 5x lower power and 20x lower latency, the optical FPGA - packaged in a common PCIe card form factor - has the potential to transform the high performance computing (HPC) landscape for data-intensive workloads such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and support novel new disaggregated compute and memory architectures and more.

"We're on the cusp of a new era in high performance computing as optical I/O becomes a 'must have' building block for meeting the exponentially growing, data-intensive demands of emerging technologies like generative AI," said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. "Showcasing the integration of Ayar Labs' silicon photonics and Intel's cutting-edge FPGA technology at Supercomputing is a concrete demonstration that optical I/O has the maturity and manufacturability needed to meet these critical demands."

Intel Corporation today announced its intent to separate its Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) operations into a standalone business. This will give PSG the autonomy and flexibility it needs to fully accelerate its growth and more effectively compete in the FPGA industry, which serves a broad array of markets, including the data center, communications, industrial, automotive, aerospace and defense sectors. Intel also announced that Sandra Rivera, executive vice president at Intel, will assume leadership of PSG as chief executive officer; Shannon Poulin has been named chief operating officer.

Standalone operations for PSG are expected to begin Jan. 1, 2024, with ongoing support from Intel. Intel expects to report PSG as a separate business unit when it releases first-quarter 2024 financials. Over the next two to three years, Intel intends to conduct an IPO for PSG and may explore opportunities with private investors to accelerate the business's growth, with Intel retaining a majority stake.

To address customers' growing needs, Intel expanded its Intel Agilex FPGA portfolio and broadened its Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) offerings to handle the increased demand for customized workloads, including enhanced AI capabilities, and to provide lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and more complete solutions. These new products and technologies will be the focus of Intel's FPGA Technology Day (IFTD) on Sept. 18, where hardware engineers, software developers and system architects can interact with Intel and partner experts.

FPGAs play an important role in Intel's portfolio by offering flexible and customizable platform capabilities for demanding applications and workloads. Intel FPGAs solve customer challenges from cloud to edge with AI capabilities across silicon, IP and software. Intel's latest announcements illustrate how the company's increased investment in its FPGA portfolio is unfolding. So far in 2023, Intel has released 11 of 15 expected new products - more new product introductions than ever in Intel's FPGA business. As disclosed in its second quarter 2023 earnings call, Intel reported that its PSG business unit delivered 35% revenue growth year-over-year, marking the third consecutive quarter of record revenue.

At this year's Hot Chips event, Intel provided the first in-depth look at its next-generation Intel Xeon product lineup, built on a new, innovative platform architecture. The platform marks an important evolution for Intel Xeon by introducing processors with a new Efficient-core (E-core) architecture alongside its well-established Performance-core (P-core) architecture. Code-named Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids, respectively, these new products will bring simplicity and flexibility to customers, offering a compatible hardware architecture and shared software stack to tackle critical workloads such as artificial intelligence.

"It is an exciting time for Intel and its Xeon roadmap. We recently shipped our millionth 4th Gen Xeon, our 5th Gen Xeon (code-named Emerald Rapids) will launch in Q4 2023 and our 2024 portfolio of data center products will prove to be a force in the industry," said Lisa Spelman, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Xeon Products and Solutions.

Intel's Programmable Solutions Group today announced that the Intel Agilex 7 with the R-Tile chiplet is shipping production-qualified devices in volume - bringing customers the first FPGA with PCIe 5.0 and CXL capabilities and the only FPGA with hard intellectual property (IP) supporting these interfaces. "Customers are demanding cutting-edge technology that offers the scalability and customization needed to not only efficiently manage current workloads, but also pivot capabilities and functions as their needs evolve. Our Agilex products offer the programmable innovation with the speed, power and capabilities our customers need while providing flexibility and resilience for the future. For example, customers are leveraging R-Tile, with PCIe Gen 5 and CXL, to accelerate software and data analytics, cutting the processing time from hours to minutes," said Shannon Poulin, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Programmable Solutions Group.

Faced with time, budget and power constraints, organizations across industries including data center, telecommunications and financial services, turn to FPGAs as flexible, programmable and efficient solutions. Using Agilex 7 with R-Tile, customers can seamlessly connect their FPGAs with processors, such as 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, with the highest bandwidth processor interfaces to accelerate targeted data center and high performance computing (HPC) workloads. Agilex 7's configurable and scalable architecture enables customers to quickly deploy customized technology - at scale with hardware speeds based on their specific needs - to reduce overall design costs and development processes and to expedite execution to achieve optimal data center performance.

Today, Intel launched Intel Agilex 7 FPGAs with F-Tile, equipped with the fastest field-programmable gate array (FPGA) transceivers available on the market and designed to help customers address challenges across the most bandwidth-intensive areas of the data-centric world, including data centers and high-speed networks. Created with embedded, networking and cloud customers in mind, Intel's new F-Tile-enabled Agilex 7 FPGAs deliver flexible hardware solutions with industry-leading transceiver performance, delivering up to 116 gigabits per second (Gbps) and hardened 400 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) intellectual property (IP).

"Intel's Agilex 7 with F-Tile is loaded with transceivers that deliver more flexibility, bandwidth and data rate performance than any other FPGA on the market today. Together with Intel manufacturing and our supply chain resilience, we're delivering multiple industry-leading products and capabilities that our customers and the industry require to address a broad range of critical business needs," said Shannon Poulin, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Programmable Solutions Group.

For more than a decade, Intel and its partners have been on a mission to virtualize the world's networks, from the core to the RAN (radio access network) and out to the edge, moving them from fixed-function hardware onto programmable, software-defined platforms, making networks more agile while driving down their complexity and cost.

Now operators are looking to cross the next chasm in delivering cloud-native functionality for automating, managing and responding to an increasingly diverse mix of data and services, providing organizations with the intelligence needed at the edge of their operations. Today, Intel announced a range of products and solutions driving this transition and broad industry support from leading operators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs).

BittWare, a Molex company, a leading supplier of enterprise-class accelerators for edge and cloud-computing applications, today introduced new card and server-level solutions featuring Intel Agilex FPGAs. The new BittWare IA-860m helps customers alleviate memory-bound application workloads by leveraging up to 32 GB of HBM2E in-package memory and 16-lanes of PCIe 5.0 (with CXL upgrade option). BittWare also added new Intel Agilex I-Series FPGA-based products with the introduction of the IA-440i and IA-640i accelerators, which support high-performance interfaces, including 400G Ethernet and PCIe 5.0 (CXL option). These newest models complement BittWare's existing lineup of Intel Agilex F-Series products to comprise one of the broadest portfolios of Intel Agilex FPGA-based offerings on the market. This announcement reinforces BittWare's commitment to addressing ever-increasing demands of high-performance compute, storage, network and sensor processing applications.

"BittWare is excited to apply Intel's advanced technology to solve increasingly difficult application problems, quickly and at low risk," said Craig Petrie, vice president, Sales and Marketing of BittWare. "Our longstanding collaboration with Intel, expertise with the latest development tools, including OneAPI, as well as alignment with Molex's global supply chain and manufacturing capabilities enable BittWare to reduce development time by 12-to-18 months while ensuring smooth transitions from proof-of-concept to volume product deployment."

With the exponential growth of data in the world today, coupled with the shift from centralized clusters of compute and data storage to a more distributed architecture that processes data everywhere—in the cloud, at the edge, and at all points in between—Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are taking on an increasingly important role in modern applications from the data center to the network to the edge. The flexibility, power efficiency, massively parallel architecture, and huge input/output (I/O) bandwidth make FPGAs attractive for accelerating a wide range of tasks from high-performance computing (HPC) to storage and networking. Many of these applications put enormous demands on memory, including capacity, bandwidth, latency and power efficiency.

To handle these high-demand applications, Intel today introduced product details for the Intel Agilex M-Series FPGAs, built on Intel 7 process technology, the industry's highest memory bandwidth FPGAs with in-package HBM DRAM. The Intel Agilex M-Series incorporates several new functional innovations and features that provide the industry with the high-speed networking, computing and memory acceleration required to meet ever-more ambitious performance and capability goals for networks, cloud and embedded edge applications.

BittWare, a Molex company, today unveiled the IA-840F, the company's first Intel Agilex -based FPGA card designed to deliver significant performance-per-watt improvements for next-generation data center, networking and edge compute workloads. Agilex FPGAs deliver up to 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower power, depending on application requirements. BittWare maximized I/O features using the Agilex chip's unique tiling architecture with dual QSFP-DDs (4× 100G), PCIe Gen4 x16, and three MCIO expansion ports for diverse applications. BittWare also announced support for Intel oneAPI, which enables an abstracted development flow for dramatically simplified code re-use across multiple architectures.

"Modern data center workloads are incredibly diverse, requiring customers to implement a mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures," said Craig Petrie, vice president of marketing for BittWare. "The IA-840F ensures that customers can quickly and easily exploit the advanced features of the Intel Agilex FPGA. For those customers who prefer to develop FPGA applications at an abstracted level, we are including support for oneAPI. This new unified software programming environment allows customers to program the Agilex FPGA from a single code base with native high-level language performance across architectures."

At Intel, we truly believe in the potential of technology to enrich lives and change the world. This has been a guiding principle since the company was founded. It started with the PC era, when technology enabled the mass digitization of knowledge and networking, bringing 1 billion people onto the internet. Then came the mobile and cloud era, a disruption that changed the way we live. We now have over 10 billion devices connected to supercomputers in the cloud.

We believe the next era will be the intelligent era. An era where we will experience 100 billion intelligent connected devices. Exascale performance and architecture will make this intelligence available to all, enriching our lives in more ways than we can imagine today. This is a future that inspires and motivates me and my fellow Intel architects every day.

Intel today announced that it has begun shipments of the first Intel Agilex field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to early access program customers. Participants in the early access program include Colorado Engineering Inc., Mantaro Networks, Microsoft and Silicom. These customers are using Agilex FPGAs to develop advanced solutions for networking, 5G and accelerated data analytics.

"The Intel Agilex FPGA product family leverages the breadth of Intel innovation and technology leadership, including architecture, packaging, process technology, developer tools and a fast path to power reduction with eASIC technology. These unmatched assets enable new levels of heterogeneous computing, system integration and processor connectivity and will be the first 10nm FPGA to provide cache-coherent and low latency connectivity to Intel Xeon processors with the upcoming Compute Express Link," said Dan McNamara, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Custom Logic Group.

Intel Corporation today reported first-quarter 2019 financial results. In the first quarter, the company generated approximately $5.0 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.4 billion and used $2.5 billion to repurchase 49 million shares of stock.

"Results for the first quarter were slightly higher than our January expectations. We shipped a strong mix of high-performance products and continued spending discipline while ramping 10nm and managing a challenging NAND pricing environment. Looking ahead, we're taking a more cautious view of the year, although we expect market conditions to improve in the second half," said Bob Swan, Intel CEO. "Our team is focused on expanding our market opportunity, accelerating our innovation and improving execution while evolving our culture. We aim to capitalize on key technology inflections that set us up to play a larger role in our customers' success, while improving returns for our owners."

Intel Corporation today reported first-quarter 2019 financial results. "Results for the first quarter were slightly higher than our January expectations. We shipped a strong mix of high performance products and continued spending discipline while ramping 10nm and managing a challenging NAND pricing environment. Looking ahead, we're taking a more cautious view of the year, although we expect market conditions to improve in the second half," said Bob Swan, Intel CEO. "Our team is focused on expanding our market opportunity, accelerating our innovation and improving execution while evolving our culture. We aim to capitalize on key technology inflections that set us up to play a larger role in our customers' success, while improving returns for our owners."

In the first quarter, the company generated approximately $5.0 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.4 billion and used $2.5 billion to repurchase 49 million shares of stock. In the first quarter, Intel achieved 4 percent growth in the PC-centric business while data-centric revenue declined 5 percent.

Intel announced today a brand-new product family, the Intel Agilex FPGA. This new family of field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) will provide customized solutions to address the unique data-centric business challenges across embedded, network and data center markets. "The race to solve data-centric problems requires agile and flexible solutions that can move, store and process data efficiently. Intel Agilex FPGAs deliver customized connectivity and acceleration while delivering much needed improvements in performance and power for diverse workloads," said Dan McNamara, Intel senior vice president, Programmable Solutions Group.

Customers need solutions that can aggregate and process increasing amounts of data traffic to enable transformative applications in emerging, data-driven industries like edge computing, networking and cloud. Whether it's through edge analytics for low-latency processing, virtualized network functions to improve performance, or data center acceleration for greater efficiency, Intel Agilex FPGAs are built to deliver customized solutions for applications from the edge to the cloud. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) analytics at the edge, network and the cloud are compelling hardware systems to cope with evolving standards, support varying AI workloads, and integrate multiple functions. Intel Agilex FPGAs provide the flexibility and agility required to meet these challenges and deliver gains in performance and power.