In a recent report from Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter, it seems that Qualcomm is now rethinking its acquisition of Intel because of financial and regulatory issues, which indicates that the potential purchase of Intel is, in some way, losing speed. Undoubtedly, the prospective arrangement has its flaws which are of a big nature. Let us not forget that Intel's debt burden of approximately $50 billion further complicates the company's financial picture. Further to the merger, regulatory approvals would be involved, which would be a long process and, therefore, very difficult. Qualcomm is currently thinking about whether to buy only a certain segment of Intel's business, possibly the division of the company that produces semiconductor chips, instead of the whole company.

Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has made it clear that they are not planning to split up the company. During an interview in November, he talked about his determination which he described as "energy and passion" to move the organization in the right direction and their strategy of "being different and at the same time, better together." Intel is leveraging other options to better its financial standing as recently this week, the company closed a $7.86 billion financing deal which is part of the US CHIPS Act, among the $3 billion from Pentagon contract confirmed this summer. Intel is still on the lookout for possibilities to do away with some of its divisions; Altera is one that it seems to be most willing to sell. Lattice Semiconductor has made a statement that it is ready to take over Altera and it would not be a surprise if Qualcomm also enters the bidding game. Qualcomm's goal is to generate an additional $22 billion in annual revenue by 2029, however, CEO Cristiano Amon said in a Bloomberg interview last week that "right now, at this time, we have not identified any large acquisition that is necessary for us to execute on this $22 billion."

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.

Altera, an Intel Company, today unveiled an array of FPGA hardware, software and development tools that make its programmable solutions more accessible across a broader range of use cases and markets. At its annual developer's conference, Altera revealed new details on its next-generation, power- and cost-optimized Agilex 3 FPGAs and announced new development kits and software support for its Agilex 5 FPGAs.

"Working closely with our ecosystem and distribution partners, Altera remains committed to delivering FPGA-based solutions that empower innovators with leading-edge programmable technologies that are easy to design and deploy. With these key announcements, we continue to execute on our vision of shaping the future by using programmable logic to help customers unlock greater value across a broad range of use cases within the data center, aerospace and defense sectors, communications infrastructure, automotive, industrial, test, medical and embedded markets," said Sandra Rivera, CEO of Altera.

Intel is reportedly exploring the sale of its Altera business, a move guided by CEO Pat Gelsinger as part of broader restructuring efforts. Acquired by Intel in 2015 for $16.7 billion, Altera, formerly known as the Programmable Solutions Group, has been a profitable segment. However, with Intel facing financial strain due to extensive spending, the company is now considering divesting its FPGA business to recoup capital. Currently, Altera operates as a separate entity within Intel, relying on the tech giant for R&D, sales, marketing, and support. Gelsinger is expected to propose the sale at a board meeting scheduled for mid-September, where he will outline his vision for Intel's future. This restructuring could also affect other parts of Intel's operations, including its Foundry business.

While previous reports suggested that Intel might spin off its Foundry unit or sell it to industry leaders like TSMC or Samsung, the latest information indicates that Intel plans to retain this division, albeit with scaled-back expansion efforts. The $32 billion factory in Germany, for example, may be scrapped, along with other capital-intensive projects, and other capital expansions may also be put on hold. Pat Gelsinger's vision still needs to be finalized and is still in the drafting phase, so until the mid-September board meeting, we have to wait to gain more information.

According to sources close to Bloomberg, Intel plans to cut 10,000 jobs from its global workforce. The news comes amid heavy pressure on the semiconductor giant, which has been on a steady decline over the years, while other industry rivals like AMD and NVIDIA have been rising and taking market share in various areas from Intel. It is reported that Intel currently has 110,000 employees globally, and reducing the workforce by 10,000 would net Intel around 100,000 global employees left. These figures exclude employees from spun-out units like Altera FPGA company, which is under Intel's ownership. Intel's aim to reduce its workforce is expected to come with a significant cost benefit to the company, with projected savings of $10 billion by 2025.

The news isn't yet official, but it is expected to see the light of the day as soon as this week. As Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger invests heavily into the fab construction and development of next-generation products, there have been a few notes that Intel would have to overcome some challenges shortly to reach its long-term goals like more advanced silicon manufacturing facilities and new products for AI/HPC and client sector. One of those short-term measures is reducing the workforce to cut down expenses. Intel has reduced its workforce before. In 2022, the company announced reduced spending in non-critical areas and reducing the workforce, and in 2023, cut the workforce by 5% to 124,800 employees last year, only to be left with 110,000 employees in 2024.

Intel Corporation today outlined a new financial reporting structure that is aligned with the company's previously announced foundry operating model for 2024 and beyond. This new structure is designed to drive increased cost discipline and higher returns by providing greater transparency, accountability and incentives across the business. To support the new structure, Intel provided recast operating segment financial results for the years 2023, 2022 and 2021. The company also shared a targeted path toward long-term growth and profitability of Intel Foundry, as well as clear goals for driving financial performance improvement and shareholder value creation.

"Intel's differentiated position as both a world-class semiconductor manufacturer and a fabless technology leader creates significant opportunities to drive long-term sustainable growth across these two complementary businesses," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "Implementing this new model marks a key achievement in our IDM 2.0 transformation as we hone our execution engine, stand up the industry's first and only systems foundry with geographically diverse leading-edge manufacturing capacity, and advance our mission to bring AI Everywhere."

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.

Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids processors have faced multiple delays over the past few years. Built on Intel 7 manufacturing process, the CPU is supposed to bring new advances for Intel's clients and significant performance uplifts. However, TrendForce reports that the mass production of Sapphire Rapids processors will be delayed from Q4 of 2022 to the first half of 2023. The reason for this (yet another) delay is that the Sapphire Rapids MCC die is facing a meager yield on Intel 7 manufacturing technology, estimated to be at only 50-60% at the time of writing. Economically, this die-yielding percentage is not profitable for Intel since many dies are turning out to be defective.

This move will stop many OEMs and cloud service providers (CSPs) from rolling out products based on the Sapphire Rapids design and will have to delay it until next year's mass production. On the contrary, AMD is likely to reap the benefits of Intel's delay, and AMD's x86 server market share will jump from 15% in 2022 to 23% in 2023. Given that AMD ships processors with the highest core counts, many companies will opt for AMD's solutions in their data centers. With more companies being concerned by their TCO measures with rising energy costs, favors fall in the hand of single-socket servers.

Intel Corporation today announced that its board of directors has promoted three corporate officers. "These promotions recognize the expanded scope and significance of the organizations for each of these proven Intel leaders," said Intel CFO and interim CEO Bob Swan. "These leaders are helping us achieve our transformation from a PC-centric to a data-centric company, and I look forward to their continued contributions."

Michelle Johnston Holthaus was promoted from corporate vice president to senior vice president. Holthaus is the general manager of Intel's Sales and Marketing Group and the interim chief marketing officer. She is responsible for global sales and revenue at Intel and leads the company's efforts to foster innovative sales and marketing approaches that broaden Intel's business opportunities and enhance customer relationships worldwide. Holthaus joined Intel in 1996 and is based in Hillsboro, Oregon.

PCPer had the opportunity to disassemble the ASUS ROG Swift PG27UQ 27", a 4K 144 Hz G-Sync HDR Monitor and found that the G-Sync module is a newer version than the one used on 1st generation G-Sync monitors (which of course do not support 4K / 144 Hz / HDR). The module is powered by an FPGA made by Altera (Intel-owned since 2015). The exact model number is Arria 10 GX 480, which is a high-performance 20 nanometer SoC that provides enough bandwidth and LVDS pins to process the data stream.

The FPGA is sold in low quantities for $2000 at Digikey and Mouser. Assuming that NVIDIA buys thousands, PCPer suggests that the price of this chip alone will add $500 to monitor cost. The BOM cost is further increased by 3 GB of DDR4 memory on the module. With added licensing fees for G-SYNC, this explains why these monitors are so expensive.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in a memo to Intel employees that the company would be taking more risks in the future. Further, the 2013-anointed CEO said that the company will center its growth strategy on data, not just computing "(...) memory, FPGAs, IOT, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving. Anything that produces data, anything that requires a lot of computing, the vision is, we're there."

The Intel CEO also mentioned the company's financial outlook and growth of recent times, with the increased focus on those same data-hungry fields have led to company to achieve an almost 50/50 ratio in income divided by both PC and all other Intel growth areas. Intel's recent acquisitions of Nervana, Mobileye and Altera, just to name a few, have been some of the more evident of these, but the company has also been picking up slightly smaller companies as well. These all sound well and good - and we all know the consumer PC market hardly makes up for most of Intel's revenue streams, but here's hoping this means increased risks and innovation in this space as well. Unless increasing computing cores on consumer processors by two units across the product stack is an immense show of risk-taking from the company, in which case: bravo. Read on for the Intel CEO's memo in its entirety, right after the break.

Intel Corporation today reported full-year revenue of $55.4 billion, operating income of $14.0 billion, net income of $11.4 billion and EPS of $2.33. The company generated approximately $19.0 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $4.6 billion and used $3.0 billion to repurchase 96 million shares of stock.

For the fourth quarter, Intel posted revenue of $14.9 billion, operating income of $4.3 billion, net income of $3.6 billion and EPS of 74 cents. The company generated approximately $5.4 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.1 billion, and used $525 million to repurchase 17 million shares of stock.

Intel Corporation today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Altera Corporation ("Altera"), a leading provider of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The acquisition complements Intel's leading-edge product portfolio and enables new classes of products in the high-growth data center and Internet of Things (IoT) market segments.

"Altera is now part of Intel, and together we will make the next generation of semiconductors not only better but able to do more," said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. "We will apply Moore's Law to grow today's FPGA business, and we'll invent new products that make amazing experiences of the future possible - experiences like autonomous driving and machine learning."

Altera will operate as a new Intel business unit called the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG), led by Altera veteran Dan McNamara. Intel is committed to a smooth transition for Altera customers and will continue the support and future product development of Altera's many products, including FPGA, ARM-based SoC and power products. In addition to strengthening the existing FPGA business, PSG will work closely with Intel's Data Center Group and IoT Group to deliver the next generation of highly customized, integrated products and solutions.

Altera Corporation and Intel Corporation today announced their collaboration on the development of multi-die devices that leverage Intel's world-class package and assembly capabilities and Altera's leading-edge programmable logic technology. The collaboration is an extension of the foundry relationship between Altera and Intel, in which Intel is manufacturing Altera's Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs using the 14 nm Tri-Gate process.

Altera's work with Intel will enable the development of multi-die devices that efficiently integrates monolithic 14 nm Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs with other advanced components, which may include DRAM, SRAM, ASICs, processors and analog components, in a single package. The integration will be enabled through the use of high-performance heterogeneous multi-die interconnect technology. Altera's heterogeneous multi-die devices provide the benefit of traditional 2.5 and 3D approaches with more favorable economic metrics. The devices will address the performance, memory bandwidth and thermal challenges impacting high-end applications in the communications, high-performance computing, broadcast and military segments.