Intel in Talks to Buy Altera

They make a lot of programmable logic and such as well. I'm kind of curious what they'd do with this sort of tech. I would hope they'd keep producing the same types of products in addition to whatever Intel wants them for.
 
Intel-branded FPGAs? Would be interesting. So far Intel hasn't done much in the area of programmable logic. Might be that they see an expansion opportunity there.

As long as they don't make the Altera FPGA dev tools even worse, it's fine with me :)
 
Elledan said:
Intel-branded FPGAs? Would be interesting. So far Intel hasn't done much in the area of programmable logic. Might be that they see an expansion opportunity there.

As long as they don't make the Altera FPGA dev tools even worse, it's fine with me :)
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:D I haven't actually tried theirs yet. I just started digging into Xilinx ISE a bit. For what I'm doing it seemed to make sense. Not to mention I don't code, and like the schematic design element. I do audio circuits, so nothing terribly complex. There's also a Xilinx CPLD that has a wider power supply/IO range that makes it easier to interface with what I'm doing.

I've seen a pretty cool device made on the Cyclone though, so that's why I've been looking at Altera a bit.

After thinking about it a bit, I was thinking that Intel's interest may be in the SoC areas for expanding their mobile side a bit.
 
J3RK said:
:D I haven't actually tried theirs yet. I just started digging into Xilinx ISE a bit. For what I'm doing it seemed to make sense. Not to mention I don't code, and like the schematic design element. I do audio circuits, so nothing terribly complex. There's also a Xilinx CPLD that has a wider power supply/IO range that makes it easier to interface with what I'm doing.

I've seen a pretty cool device made on the Cyclone though, so that's why I've been looking at Altera a bit.

After thinking about it a bit, I was thinking that Intel's interest may be in the SoC areas for expanding their mobile side a bit.
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I'm doing VHDL development for custom CPU archs and related. Fun stuff. FPGAs are pretty much everywhere at this point now, due to their ever-decreasing price per unit. Especially for Cyclones, cheap Spartans (3E is still popular, I think) and of course the increasing use of super-cheap Lattice FPGAs and CPLDs. I'm using a MachXO2-based board at the moment in addition to the other dev boards :)

FPGAs are often integrated with other logic blocks, sometimes entire ARM SoCs and what not. Definitely should have some interesting things for Intel to use there.
 
erek said:
Altera, a maker of chips for networks and cars
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They are a manufacturer of programable logic devices. I know some high end networking gear uses FPGAs and they offer automotive variants of their devices so presumablly there must be some automotive applicaitons but still "maker of chips for networks and cars" is a very strange way to describe them.
 
After thinking about it a bit, I was thinking that Intel's interest may be in the SoC areas for expanding their mobile side a bit.
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Phones are mass-market and power-constrained so they use custom silicon not programable logic. I can think of a couple of reasons why intel would be interested in altera.

1: they want to bring atom to the "FPGA-Soc" market (that is chips which have a FPGA for custom logic and also a processor for talking to the outside world and/or doing stuff that fits better with the capabilities of a processor than with programable logic). They could also sell such a combination as a test platform for custom atom based SoCs.
2: they belive they can improve alteras high end FPGA products (a company like intel needs high end FPGA products for chip development). Intel has already announced that they will be doing fab work for altera and it may be that through that they have seen ways they could improve the product if they applied their engineers skills to it.
 
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