Back in 2015, when Intel was flush with cash thanks to a near-monopoly from X86 datacenter compute, it shelled out an incredible $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA maker Altera because a few hyperscalers and cloud builders were monkeying around with offloading whole chunks of CPU compute to FPGAs to create SmartNICs. …
When it comes to memory for compute engines, FPGAs – or rather what we have started calling hybrid FPGAs because they have all kinds of hard coded logic as well as the FPGA programmable logic on a single package – have the broadest selection of memory types of any kind of device out there. …
As AMD is getting closer to closing its $35 billion acquisition of FPGA maker Xilinx, it is natural to think about how well that business is doing and how it is competing against its main rival, Intel – specifically, the Programmable Solutions Group, formerly known as the free-standing Altera before the latter was acquired by Intel in June 2015 for $16.7 billion. …
Intel has spent more than three decades evolving from the dominant provider of CPUs for personal computers to the dominant supplier of processors for servers in the datacenter. …
When Intel purchased Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion, company officials predicted that up to a third of servers would be equipped with FPGAs by 2020. …
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