Lattice Semiconductor Explores Buying Intel's Altera Unit

[Nomad76]

Intel Altera's FPGA unit is attracting a lot of attention in the semiconductor industry according to a recent report by Bloomberg, Lattice Semiconductor emerging as a potential buyer for the entire division. Bloomberg reports that Lattice actively works with advisers and seeks private-sector backing to support their bid. However, Intel's preference appears to be leaning toward selling only a small portion of its Altera shares instead of selling everything and this can be a decisive factor in upcoming negotiations. The potential sale has attracted interest from many outside Lattice Semiconductor, including major private equity firms such as Francisco Partners, Bain Capital, and Silver Lake Management. Qualcomm has also expressed interest in acquiring parts of Intel's design business.

Bloomberg also reports that selling just a portion of Altera's shares would likely require complex financial arrangements, while private equity firms are considering investing about $3 billion through instruments. This could result in Intel's valuation being lower than the original purchase price. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has indicated plans to close the Altera transaction in early 2024, with the company valuing the nearly $16.7 billion Intel paid for Altera in 2015 at approximately $17 billion. Lattice's market value of $7.48 billion is certainly smaller and can challenge Lattice's ambitions for complete control of Altera. The Intel board discussed Altera's future last week and prefers to sell only a minority stake, with a decision expected soon.



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[Daven]

Intel has to be careful from now on regarding which IP it sells. Losing rights to certain technology can lower Intel's valuation should the company ever want to be sold.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

ti's funny thinking all the truckloads of money intel wasted buying altera in the first place, it seems they never finished integrating it into "intel", think on how we could have FPGA cores on a separate die on the CPU nowadays...

AMD has done far better with xilinx in that aspect

 

[dont whant to set it"']

There is an add in a Gran Theft Auto game read along the lines " buy high ,sell low".
2cents drunken citizen out.

 

[bonehead123]

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has indicated plans to close the Altera transaction in early 2024

A typo ?

Or is Patsy that far behind on his calendar/schedule ?

Anyway, this transaction would probably make their financial quagmire much worse than it already is, so probably not a good idea

 

[igormp]

think on how we could have FPGA cores on a separate die on the CPU nowadays...

Like this one from 6 years ago?
But yeah, apart from this product (that I don't think got any significant traction) seems like they did fuck all with Altera.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

Like this one from 6 years ago?
But yeah, apart from this product (that I don't think got any significant traction) seems like they did fuck all with Altera.

i remember that one, but did it ever was commercialized at scale? i think it was a dead on arrival product as they never did followups. I also meant this for consumers

Imagine with a FPGA array you could have HW decoders/encoders for whatever new codecs shows and software defined accelerators, but i guess that would make the people buy even less of your new shiny thing as they can reprogram what they have.

Intel had really no business buying altera, they operate in absolute different parts of the tech spectrum with zero overlap, nothing that altera brought was of use to intel being a low volume extremely expensive high-cost high-margin product with zero use for consumers. Absolutely ZERO of altera's IP made its way into intel core products (CPU/GPU as that's pretty much all they have left after they divested themselves of f everything else, they barely do networking).

PRetty much teh same applies to AMD buying xilinx, which itr even seems they bought out of panic/spite, as again absolutely nothing of xilinx made their way into AMD products, for example a epyc or ryzen cpu with a fpga die!, or a full FPGA IO die which would allow on-the-fly reconfiguration of IFOP lanes and allow them to support faster/different memory

 

[OSdevr]

i remember that one, but did it ever was commercialized at scale? i think it was a dead on arrival product as they never did followups. I also meant this for consumers

Imagine with a FPGA array you could have HW decoders/encoders for whatever new codecs shows and software defined accelerators, but i guess that would make the people buy even less of your new shiny thing as they can reprogram what they have.

Intel had really no business buying altera, they operate in absolute different parts of the tech spectrum with zero overlap, nothing that altera brought was of use to intel being a low volume extremely expensive high-cost high-margin product with zero use for consumers. Absolutely ZERO of altera's IP made its way into intel core products (CPU/GPU as that's pretty much all they have left after they divested themselves of f everything else, they barely do networking).

PRetty much teh same applies to AMD buying xilinx, which itr even seems they bought out of panic/spite, as again absolutely nothing of xilinx made their way into AMD products, for example a epyc or ryzen cpu with a fpga die!, or a full FPGA IO die which would allow on-the-fly reconfiguration of IFOP lanes and allow them to support faster/different memory

Funny thing is both Altera and Xilinx make CPU+FPGA SOCs but they use ARM cores instead of x86.