RUMOR: Intel looking to buy Altera - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2015, 06:21:57 am
content: http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2015/03/28/intel-altera-acquisition-rumor/

author: techydude
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 02, 2015, 04:02:14 am
content: rumor no more:http://www.itnews.com.au/News/404713,intel-to-buy-altera-for-22-billion.aspx

author: Richard Crowley
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 12:06:42 am
content: Acquisition completed....http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2015/12/28/intel-completes-acquisition-of-altera

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 01:59:40 am
content: The future:Words such as "expects", "intends", "plans", "believes", "seeks", "estimates", "continues", "may", "will", "should", and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements.Statements that refer to or are based on projections, uncertain events or assumptions also identify forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of results and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements.

author: Armxnian
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 02:32:05 am
content: QuoteUh... we need new tech like quantum computing, not a 10% increase in CPU/FPGA performance every year...

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 08:14:56 am
content: Why?My main complaint about Altera products is that they're way too expensive. A small FPGA like an EP4CE6 is still about £8 and has been for years; they've concentrated on bigger / faster / costlier, and completely failed to expand the range into smaller, lower cost components.Maybe if Intel are genuinely interested in making IoT products, then that'll mean more FPGAs targeted at the consumer market. That's a good thing, IMHO.

author: andersm
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 12:54:15 pm
content: Quote from: MT on December 29, 2015, 01:59:40 amHaven't you ever seen a press release from a publicly listed company before?

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 01:28:04 pm
content: Quote from: Armxnian on December 29, 2015, 02:32:05 amOne does not "apply Moore's law" like ohms lawYou simply continue to innovate process technology, and maybe, with hindsight, "Moore's law" will still hold after that iteration.

author: grumpydoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 01:45:05 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on December 29, 2015, 01:28:04 pmIndeed - Moore's "law" was merely an observationIt is amazing that we have continued to "keep up" but sooner or later we're going to start hitting some insurmountable physical limits.

author: Richard Crowley
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 01:56:15 pm
content: Quote from: andersm on December 29, 2015, 12:54:15 pmApparently he hasn't. God save us from the lawyers and the bean-counters.But mostly from the Idiots who bring lawsuits against companies for thinking that projections are some kind of guarantee. They don't even know what they will have for lunch tomorrow

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 02:49:06 pm
content: I wonder what they'll do with the ARM SoCs.

author: poorchava
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 07:46:37 pm
content: Quote from: AndyC_772 on December 29, 2015, 08:14:56 amWell, I think Altera and Xilinx never aimed for the low-end market. This has been Lattice's and Actel's territory for some time.Sent from my HTC One M8s using Tapatalk.

author: marshallh
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 10:54:38 pm
content: RTFM for answers to all your questions:http://intelacquiresaltera.transactionannouncement.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/CustomerFAQ_FINALNov30.pdfThe short version is that nothing will change, at least in the short term, other than becoming Intel PSG and possibly new markings.By teh way, if you RFQ the cheap parts and expensive parts, you'll find that you can only get maneuvering room on the pricey ones. Costs of the smaller devices are dominated by die size and packaging. (Die size of a EP4CE6 is still pretty big...) And once you have this size of a die, there's no reason to not put tons of IO pads around the periphery.

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 11:08:11 pm
content: Quote from: marshallh on December 29, 2015, 10:54:38 pmRegrettably almost not worth the paper it's written on. If you've ever been at the sharp end of an M&A you'll know that soothing remarks like these are part and parcel of it.They may have "no plan to discontinue existing products" now, at least not that they'll admit to, but that's exactly what all takeovers state, until a few months time...It's also difficult to understand the continuous attempt to mention IoT, I see little if any fit for Altera parts in consumer driven products unless the pricing and marketing is dramatically reshaped, which it might well be.

author: marshallh
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 29, 2015, 11:19:11 pm
content: I'm not sure what attraction to IoT garbage is. Literally nothing Altera makes is suitable for IoT applications. Seems like misguided industry hype.You are probably right about the future plans. If they restructure with dollar signs as the target, they'll be stupid to not axe the lowend parts and only keep the highend families. At which point we will be looking elsewhere...

author: Armxnian
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 10:16:33 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on December 29, 2015, 01:28:04 pmThat is exactly what one does. As long as Intel satisfies another cycle of Moore's law, customers will flock. Observation in the past or not, they have taken advantage and used Moore's law as a cover up for what they are really capable of. They have zero real competition in the consumer market and are also dominant in many enterprise environments. Anything that takes some of their market share and revenue away is kept alive so they don't run into trouble with the law in regards to being a monopoly. Their business side is as genius as their engineering department. They release only what they need to keep "innovating". Intel has their plans laid out for years to come. They anually "leak" some of it to keep us salivating over the next 8 core CPU.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 10:38:49 am
content: Had to be done

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 10:48:27 am
content: Both Google and Microsoft (Bing) use FPGAs on their data centers or at least they are experimenting with that notion.I could definitely use a Xeon processor with FPGA fabric, might not happen yet, but it's coming.Think about it, configurable hardware driven protocols on a data center saving some watts.Maybe Intel is not saying much about it yet, but an FPGA co-processor is pretty cool and I bet it's in the works.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 11:15:42 am
content: imagine a cpu pipeline with programmable hardware instructions.Or a cpu that automatically preemptively configures itself to replace common instruction sequences into a single instruction in hardware.

author: Armxnian
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 11:47:11 am
content: Why use a CPU then in that case? The purpose of a CPU is to run everything well, not a single thing ridiculously fast. What would your product lineup be? 10 different processors with different frequencies and core counts, multiplied by 50 different versions that excel at a single operation? The other option would be to have a single modern cpu that excels at many different tasks? Then you have a 50GHz i7. Neither of those two are realistic.A co processor fpga communicating via the pcie bus sounds cool, kind of like what a gpu does. But what are the practical uses, and why hasen't it already been done? More and more instruction sets are being added with every generation, seems like it's working pretty well.That customer FAQ linked on the previous page summarised it pretty well. Intel just wants its name on more stuff. Nothing more.

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 12:04:08 pm
content: Configurable peripherals in a small microcontroller would be nice. Suppose I want to have a processor read a value from an ADC at exactly regular intervals.One option would be to set up a timer. Maybe it has a couple of outputs; one which can toggle a GPIO to start acquisition, and then another output a short time later which calls an ISR. The ISR wiggles a few more GPIOs, or maybe kicks off a DMA transfer which in turn uses an SPI peripheral to suck the data out of the ADC. Then, when the DMA transfer is complete, another ISR is called which wiggles another GPIO, sticks the ADC result in a buffer, and signals to the foreground task that it's available.All this is a PITA to set up, as well as taking up potentially valuable CPU time.How much better would it be to simply create a peripheral in programmable logic which does exactly this? Kick off a timer at start up, wiggle pins as necessary, then only signal the host CPU when the final data is already in a FIFO?Better yet, signal the host CPU when that ADC data has already been filtered, analysed, averaged, interpolated, checked for outliers and generally passed as valid and meaningful to the top level application?FPGA fabric in a CPU would be a great thing, but not to make the CPU faster.

author: daqq
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 12:50:57 pm
content: QuoteActually, there are specific cards that do this - though they are mostly specialized industry specific things. See:http://www.nallatech.com/At the moment it's useful for high performance computing, network acceleration and such. I'm pretty sure people can up with ways to use an FPGA cooprocessor once they are no longer more expensive than several computers.See:https://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-1512- while this is not meant as a cooprocesor to offload the heavy math and such, it's still a step to that place.QuoteI can imagine software specific acceleration being outsourced to an FPGA rather than use the CPU. Making effectively your own instructions as the software needs would give you far more power. Just look at how well the software industry has adapted to using GPU acceleration. Now imagine say, a database searcher/filter done in hardware - you could just stream a whole database through a bunch of logic blocks without the CPU even looking at the content, a pre"compiled" logic could check against a bunch of conditions on the run in a pipe line like structure, stick those that comply to the search into an outgoing FIFO.QuoteLook at the PSoC devices from Cypress.

author: timb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 03:32:26 pm
content: Quote from: AndyC_772 on December 30, 2015, 12:04:08 pmIt exists. Check out the Cypress PSoC line. It's between an FPGA and CPLD in terms of performance. Can be programmed in VHDL, with a Schematic interface *or* you can directly program the custom ALU bits.They're very nice and full of awesomeness.Sent from my Smartphone

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 03:33:37 pm
content: Thanks guys, will check them out.

author: andersm
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 04:20:47 pm
content: Quote from: Armxnian on December 30, 2015, 10:16:33 amGiven that it takes around 4 years to develop processors of that complexity, you'd bloody well hope they have. Any company that doesn't have some kind of a roadmap is pretty sure not to be very long-lived.Unless there's something that's been worked on in secret, I can't imagine there will be any product announcement for five years, provided Intel are even interested in putting their cores in FPGAs. The most visible change will probably be Altera pushing Wind River even harder as the preferred software provider for their SoCs.

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 30, 2015, 08:31:15 pm
content: Altera already has hard core ARM processors in their offerings.The reason for FPGAs on a data center is to lower energy consumption as well as speeding things up to remain competitive. For example Microsoft was brining them to the datacenter.http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/06/27/programmable-fpga-chips-coming-to-microsoft-data-centers/Intel already announced a while back they are working of FPGA fabric for their Xeon processors.http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/06/19/intel-offer-hyper-scale-operators-ability-reconfigure-cpus-dime/I can't find the reference for Google, but I did read they were also doing that.But having the fabric on the chip will be even more efficient than going through an external bus. Altera already has that know-how using their Avalon interconnect.Not sure what progress has been made, but it's coming.Edit: I forgot to mention, Altera has been using Intel's tech for their higher end FPGAs for a while now.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 31, 2015, 01:00:28 am
content: Quote from: Armxnian on December 30, 2015, 11:47:11 amIt has been done but only huge corporations have the scale to benefit from rolling out FPGA acceleration right now, data centres using FPGAs for packet filtering and queuing is an extension of their extensive use in packet network infrastructure. There is something of a chicken and egg situation where you don't see applications because the hardware is obscure/expensive/fragmented, this changes as soon as a common fabric is available in large numbers of consumer CPUs, just as there was offload to GPUs once they became somewhat uniform and commonplace it just needs an installed base to become viable. An FPGA can change context fast enough for it to be doing many different accelerations in professional workflows, as the user pulls up a tool or picks a command the appropriate acceleration is loaded and fed data. In a common consumer example, rather than needing "hard" accelerators for video encode/decode appropriate accelerators can be loaded as needed for different codecs as the user needs them, power constrained devices still rely on application specific cores to achieve their performance and with desktop computing slowly fading into the minority it will allow the transition of greater flexibility into lower power platforms.

author: daqq
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 04, 2016, 01:54:16 pm
content: Exactly on topic of FPGA-CPU integration usefulness:https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/FPGA-based-Ryft-ONE-search-accelerator-delivers-100x-performance/ba-p/667171

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 04, 2016, 02:13:14 pm
content: It looks to me as though that product is all about performing specific operations on a large data set independently of any CPU. The relationship between the two looks to be more along the lines of "here's the data, here's a set of rules which define what to do with it, call me when you're done".

author: andersm
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 04, 2016, 02:48:19 pm
content: AFAIK, no-one is offering products with tighter integration. I don't believe throwing arbitrary FPGA logic into a tightly optimized CPU pipeline would work very well. For applications like that, there are several IP companies offering customizable cores (eg. Cadence Xtensa, Synopsys ARC, MIPS CorExtend).

author: daqq
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 04, 2016, 06:16:08 pm
content: QuoteThis is pretty much the same as Xilinx do with their ZYNQ line - two ARMs surrounded by a lot of programmable fabric. Both the fabric and the processor can access the memory system through the bus system.

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2016, 04:13:43 pm
content: Quote from: miguelvp on December 30, 2015, 10:48:27 amQuote from: miguelvp on December 30, 2015, 08:31:15 pmWell, it is happening and coming in 2017:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/intelaltera-brings-fpga-to-xeon-broadwell-chip/