Raider becomes Twix, becomes Raider – that's how you could summarize Altera's company history over the past 10 years. In 2015, Intel took over the FPGA specialist and then gave up the brand name. At the time, Altera was considered an FPGA giant – Intel cost $16.7 billion to purchase it – but the manufacturer has since lost importance.
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FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array and means logic gates that can be interconnected for various tasks using hardware languages. Nvidia uses Intel FPGAs for its G-Sync modules, for example. There they take on the task of monitor scalers as a bridge chip between the display and graphics card.
After the takeover, Altera's programmable logic chips traded under the name Intel, for example with the series names Agilex and Stratix.
An Intel company, but independent
Under CEO Pat Gelsinger, Intel is now spinning off the FPGA manufacturer as an independent company again. The subsidiary is now marketed as “Altera – An Intel Company”. Sandra Rivera, who previously headed Intel's Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) division, is now Altera CEO.
Intel is taking the step in the opposite direction to AMD. The competitor took over the FPGA specialist Xilinx in 2022 and is using its expertise for server hardware, but also for the AI accelerator Ryzen AI, which is found in current Ryzen APUs such as the Ryzen 8000G.
Altera wants to jump on the AI bandwagon and is advertising “AI infused” FPGAs, which are in direct competition with Xilinx products. New models in the Agilex 9, Agilex 7, Agilex 5 and Agilex 3 series are expected to appear soon. Some of them are already in series production, some of them Intel is sending test samples to partners.
In a preliminary briefing, Rivera emphasized that Altera operates largely autonomously and is therefore not tied to Intel Foundry as a chip manufacturer. The previous Agilex 9 FPGAs, for example, roll off the production line with Intel 7 technology. In the future, Altera could also book more production capacity with TSMC.
(mma)