Intel Reincarnates Altera as Independent Company, Launches Agilex 9/7/5/3 Series FPGAs

[AleksandarK]

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.



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[john_]

Having no idea of FPGAs, I wonder how Altera is compared to Xilinx that AMD bought for 3 times the price.
Seeing Altera being spun off with the hope to improve, reading about (the need/hope for) "outside investment" and also reading about "targeting lower-end and mid-range FPGAs" I wonder if this is an indication that Altera fell behind in the FPGA market while being a part of Intel.

 

[remixedcat]

Subnautica is looking less fiction every day....
don't wanna spoil much about that game but you'll see

 

[Ferrum Master]

Having no idea of FPGAs, I wonder how Altera is compared to Xilinx that AMD bought for 3 times the price.
Seeing Altera being spun off with the hope to improve, reading about (the need/hope for) "outside investment" and also reading about "targeting lower-end and mid-range FPGAs" I wonder if this is an indication that Altera fell behind in the FPGA market while being a part of Intel.

Xilinx were more advanced even before Intel ate Altera.

Subnautica is looking less fiction every day....
don't wanna spoil much about that game but you'll see

Calling Sunbeam? But that was AlteRRa.

Other than that, this is a rare practice. It is like nvidia would revive Voodoo. Pretty head scratching.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Having no idea of FPGAs

Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Put another way, custom programmable integrated circuitry.

With an FPGA, you can have a CPU that will run Commodore64 code one day, Amiga code the next and Pentium code the day after that. FPGA's are VERY flexible and very useful.

Xilinx were more advanced even before Intel ate Altera.

While true, that does not mean that Altera/Intel FPGAs are not useful or worth their price.

 

[Wirko]

This partial split of Altera and Intel could also mean that Intel had big plans for the integration of FPGA blocks into their big Xeons. They could either be accelerators (outside the cores) or some kind of execution units inside the cores. and eventually didn't find a way to do that in an useful and efficient way.

FPGAs are as inefficient as they are flexible, they require several times more transistors than a fixed logic block with the same function. I'm not surprised that no one is willing to integrate them today. But I expect new FPGA architectures to evolve, which will combine more fixed logic with some programmable logic, and still be flexible enough for many use cases in servers.

While true, that does not mean that Altera/Intel FPGAs are not useful or worth their price.

Xilinx had products and IP beyond FPGAs, such as networking technologies. That's one reason AMD wanted them. I don't know about Altera, did they also have other valuable stuff beside FPGAs?

 

[silentbogo]

They could either be accelerators (outside the cores) or some kind of execution units inside the cores. and eventually didn't find a way to do that in an useful and efficient way.

That was my thought back when acquisition just happened, but over the years the only thing it materialized - is paid "unlockable" features in enterprise SKUs.
DLC for Xeons, to be short.

 

[Wirko]

That was my thought back when acquisition just happened, but over the years the only thing it materialized - is paid "unlockable" features in enterprise SKUs.
DLC for Xeons, to be short.

If FPGAs inside processors existed, your description would apply to them too.