Why Did Intel Pay $15B For Altera?
While I was at the imec Technology Forum someone asked me “Why did Intel pay $15B for Altera?” (the actual reported number is $16.7B).
The received wisdom is that Intel decided that it needs FPGA technology to remain competitive in the datacenter. There is a belief among some people that without FPGA acceleration available for vision processing, search and other algorithms that map better onto a hardware fabric than a processor, then Intel will gradually have more and more competitors in the datacenter. Even if you only put that possibility at 50-50 (say) then the “only the paranoid survive” attitude is to get an FPGA acceleration solution anyway. Of course they don’t need to buy Altera to do that. I’m sure Altera (or Xilinx even) would be happy to sell them all the chips they need. But at some point that technology may need to be embedded in which case having it on the same process already counts for something.
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