Is FPGA Intel Next Big Thing for IoT ?

By SemiWiki

November 7, 2016

I write this article in reaction to another article from Seeking Alpha titled “Intel Next Big Thing”. I have extracted this from the article:

The IoT space is growing rapidly with the advent of connected cars, smart homes and a variety of connected devices and appliances. However, before a full-blown ecosystem around these devices is developed, device makers have to deal with power efficiency. The good news is that with the help of low-power FPGAs, the devices can be made power efficient.

People writing in SA are expected to explain why you should (or should not) buy stock from a company in respect with this company’ strategy. In this case, the “Next Big Thing” for Intel is the Altera FPGA product line and the article explains how Intel could generate high return on their ($37B) investment by developing the FPGA business in Data Center and IoT. Data Center and IoT are completely different stories and the IoT ecosystem interesct with the data center only if you consider that the amount of data generated by a multitude of IoT systems will end up in the cloud, in the data center. Let’s see why I think that the flagship FPGA from Altera (or Xilinx, by the way), the products priced over $1,000, very performant and extensively used in Networking are NOT the best choice for IoT application, if you agree with the prerequisite “have to deal with power efficiency”.

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