Intel to spin off FPGA biz - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: AK6DN
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 03:59:19 am
content: Maybe they will call it Altera ...https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/03/intel_spins_off_fpga_biz/?td=rt-3a

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 05:13:14 am
content: I hope they will change their business model of milking customers left and right, as well as stop ignoring customers which want to buy less than 1M$ worth of chips.

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 02:10:15 pm
content: Quote from: asmi on October 05, 2023, 05:13:14 amThe article says they want to compete more effectively in the mid and low end of the market which is nice. I'm not sure how that will translate to lower volume customers, but their low and mid range portfolio is pretty weak.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 02:57:53 pm
content: This was to be expected from Intel... buy it and let it die. Next thing you know TCFKA (The company formerly known as Altera) will be bought by another big semiconductor vendor. That is the purpose of spinning off businesses. Maybe Microchip? Or AMD to fortify their portfolio against the upcoming competition?

author: Boscoe
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 03:02:03 pm
content: Quote from: ejeffrey on October 05, 2023, 02:10:15 pmI feel like Efinix and Gowin are doing quite well there. Efinixs tooling is a god send compared to Quartus and Vivado.

author: AK6DN
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 05:18:04 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on October 05, 2023, 02:57:53 pmProbably not AMD, they already bought Xilinx. Need someone with deep pockets or not very smart. Hey Elon, you need some FPGAs for your Teslas?

author: KE5FX
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 05:36:45 pm
content: Not only did AMD already buy Xilinx, they did it in response to Intel's purchase of Altera. At this point it will be slowly dawning on the AMD execs that they have been trolled.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 06:45:51 pm
content: Maybe let's wait a little bit till we get more detailed info on what's going to happen?But otherwise yes, it's not surprising. While addressing a relatively large market per se, FPGAs are a niche market for Intel, and the big dinosaurs are not made to handle niche markets properly. They have to spin off sooner or later.When they bought Altera, I was kinda expecting they would leverage FPGA technology to design innovative hybrid CPUs which could have given them a major edge, but while they did some of that, what they eventually did was pretty disappointing compared to what could have been.So, at this point, looks like they missed the opportunity and it'll just become a sister company that they may very well resell to whoever has the best offer down the line. Maybe NVidia.

author: langwadt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 07:13:29 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 05, 2023, 06:45:51 pmdid they try pairing fpga with some old frankensteined x86?

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 07:20:33 pm
content: Quote from: KE5FX on October 05, 2023, 05:36:45 pmI don't think thats really true. AMD didn't buy Xilinx to compete with Intel's FPGA products, they bought it to compete with NVidia for data center acceleration. Also, they will be hard pressed to do a worse job of managing their acquisition and product line than Intel did. At the very least, AMD isn't going to tie Xilinx's future to an in-house fab process that gets delayed for years.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 07:22:05 pm
content: AMD did some nice things with the Xilinx stuff, for example the AV1 hardware encoder cardIf anything, I think AMD should have bought AsMedia (they already use their IP for the usb and sata controllers in the chipset) and a company that does ethernet, just like nvidia bought mellanox. Realtek is too big for AMD to buy, but maybe some smaller player... shame they couldn't buy aquantia for example.

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 07:33:14 pm
content: Quote from: mariush on October 05, 2023, 07:22:05 pmThe did buy a company that does Ethernet. They bought Xilinx. Xilinx had previously purchased Solarflare, although high performance networking was already a major part of their FPGA product line.

author: PCB.Wiz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 08, 2023, 11:17:08 pm
content: Seems to be an announcement only...QuoteNot for 2-3 years and they keep a majority stake ?

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 08, 2023, 11:36:30 pm
content: Quote from: langwadt on October 05, 2023, 07:13:29 pmYes.https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/24/a-peek-inside-that-intel-xeon-fpga-hybrid-chip/

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 09, 2023, 02:19:52 am
content: Quote from: ejeffrey on October 05, 2023, 07:20:33 pmI doubt it. Hard silicon will always win against PL on tasks it was designed to do. Datacenter stuff nowadays is all about ML, which GPU or GPU-like-accelerators do waaay better in that regard. Programmable stuff is better in the edge computing because those devices tend to be quite specialized, and as a concequence, not high enough volume to spin up an ASIC. Zynq US+ and Artix US+ are often used in 4K IP cameras and in edge vision systems.

author: KE5FX
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 09, 2023, 03:01:01 am
content: Quote from: asmi on October 09, 2023, 02:19:52 amMy guess is, that realization what is prompting the sale. The future of the data center belongs to linear algebra, not LUTs.

author: asmi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 09, 2023, 05:10:31 am
content: Quote from: KE5FX on October 09, 2023, 03:01:01 amI think the sale is simply a new management's way of cleaning up the books since whatever plan that old management had for Altera didn't work out and it seems to me that new management couldn't come up with any worthwhile replacement plan.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 09, 2023, 05:44:20 am
content: Yep this was only a matter of time.Alteras niche field of business doesn't really fit into the huge markets that Intel is used to dealing with. The only reason they bought them was the idea of a FPGA accelerator for data center applications, but we saw how well that went. So there is no longer any reason to keep them around. Intel caused enugh hawok already by nuking the website and forum, making documentation a lot harder to find.Their ticket to datacenter acceleration would have been GPUs, but the recent Intel dedicated GPU endeavor was pretty underwhelming.Not sure what AMD is planning to do with Xilinx but something similar will likely happen.

author: greghol
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: October 14, 2023, 08:35:56 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on October 05, 2023, 02:57:53 pmMicrochip already has Microsemi/Actel.https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/fpgasGreg

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 14, 2023, 01:00:21 pm
content: Quote from: asmi on October 09, 2023, 02:19:52 amI don't disagree, but based on AMDs website I think it's pretty clear that is their intent.