2024-08-03 - tech

Intel established an independent FPGA company Altera

This decision signifies the separation of the two major technological paths of CPUs and FPGAs.

Intel announced today the establishment of a new FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) semiconductor company, Altera.

At the FPGA Vision online conference, Altera CEO Sandra Rivera and Chief Operating Officer Shannon Poulin unveiled the company's future strategic plans and product roadmap. Altera is committed to providing end-to-end FPGA solutions, user-friendly AI, and software tools, while also strengthening the resilience of the supply chain to maintain a leading position in the FPGA market.

Altera CEO Sandra Rivera stated that artificial intelligence (AI) offers a growing and potentially lucrative opportunity for Intel's newly independent programmable chip division.

Intel's programmable chip division began operating as an independent company earlier this year and recently outlined its future plans and official name: "Altera, an Intel company." Intel plans to conduct an initial public offering for Altera within the next two to three years.

It is reported that Intel acquired Altera for $16.7 billion in 2015, which is also the largest acquisition deal in the company's history to date.Sandra Rivera stated that Altera's programmable chip designs are highly useful for artificial intelligence applications and computational tasks that lie between the specialized custom processors designed by cloud computing companies like Amazon and the general-purpose AI chips manufactured by Nvidia.

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Sandra Rivera noted that due to the ever-evolving hardware requirements for artificial intelligence, programmable chips will fill a growing niche market. "(Programmable chips) are always at the forefront of the innovation cycle, and our job is to maintain a leading position. To make it easy to drive these transitions."

Sandra Rivera anticipates the market size for programmable chips to be around $8 to $10 billion by 2023, also mentioning that there are many programmable chips that assist at various stages of the "AI workflow."

Altera's product portfolio will become more diversified, including the industry's only FPGA with built-in AI capabilities. This move will help customers tackle increasingly complex technological and market challenges and stand out from competitors. Altera FPGAs have widespread applications in cloud computing, data centers, industrial automation, communication infrastructure, and automotive systems.

In terms of new products, Altera announced the launch of the Agilex 9 FPGA, which boasts the industry's fastest data conversion performance, specifically designed for radar and military aerospace systems that require high-bandwidth mixed-signal processing; the Agilex 7 series is tailored for data center and network applications, with performance per watt doubled compared to competitors; and the Agilex 5 is the industry's first FPGA with built-in AI computation, highly suitable for intelligent edge devices.

Beyond hardware, Altera has enhanced its FPGA design software, Quartus Prime, as well as the AI acceleration-related IP and tool suite, allowing customers to more easily develop FPGAs and deploy AI models.

Altera is currently pursuing the entire potential market, primarily targeting Xilinx but also Achronix and Lattice Semiconductor. Achronix, like Xilinx and Altera, sells FPGAs to data centers, and all four companies have embedded and edge use cases, covering defense and aerospace, telecommunications and networking, industrial and other industries, as well as beyond data centers.

Overall, in addition to standard use cases in networking, automotive, consumer products, and industrial products, Altera is also pursuing data analytics, SmartNIC and DPU, 5G and 6G mobile infrastructure, robotics and motion control, video conferencing and distribution, machine vision workloads, testing and medical, and defense electronics. Below is the overall roadmap and customer segmentation for the Altera FPGA series, as well as their comparisons in terms of functionality, cost, and capacity.We can see the new determination of Altera, and the FPGA market is also stirring up waves again. The re-splitting of FPGA has sparked widespread discussion in the tech community. This decision marks the separation of the two major technological paths of CPU and FPGA.

Intel's current Agilex series of programmable chips is produced by the company's contract manufacturing division, Intel Foundry. Sandra Rivera declined to disclose whether Intel Foundry will produce the upcoming Agilex 3 chips, but it hopes to be "treated like a customer" and to receive a "friends and family discount."

An Intel spokesperson stated that its contract manufacturing customers may "receive preferential pricing based on their expected sales volume, and Intel's business unit is the largest customer of Intel Foundry today."

Pat Gelsinger: The entire company's bet is on the success of Intel 18A

Intel's upcoming Intel 18A process technology is the final plan of the company's "4 years, 5 nodes" strategy established in 2021, and it will also be the culmination of Intel's years of wafer manufacturing experience and billions of dollars in R&D. In theory, Intel will use this node process to surpass competitors TSMC and Samsung in the development of advanced processes. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is candid about the importance of this process technology for the company's future and stated that he has bet the entire company on the success of Intel 18A.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, in a recent interview with Anandtech, was asked if his previous statement about betting the entire company on the next advanced process is still correct. Pat Gelsinger immediately responded with a deadpan tone, saying that he indeed bet the entire company on the Intel 18A process technology, which surprised those present.

Subsequently, Pat Gelsinger seemed to try to further dispel this awkward statement by listing all the process technologies the company is brewing.

According to Pat Gelsinger, some of the "4 years, 5 nodes" process technologies will coexist with Intel 18A. For example, including Intel 3, which is only for server CPUs, and the upgraded version of Intel 18A. Pat Gelsinger emphasized that the company will also produce mature processes with Tower Semiconductor and UMC. In addition, it will provide advanced packaging for its foundry customers, which is the goal of Intel's previous plan to set up a new factory in New Mexico. In other words, although the Intel 18A process technology will take on a lot of work for Intel, there are still many other sources of revenue besides this.The report emphasizes that, despite Pat Gelsinger's somewhat risky remarks, Intel's 18A has garnered widespread interest in the industry even though it is not yet ready for launch. In April 2023, the company announced an agreement with Arm to manufacture customized SoCs on Intel 18A. This month, the company also announced a potential multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft to use Intel 18A to manufacture customized chips, which may surprise TSMC's personnel.

However, despite Intel's recent achievements in the market, TSMC has stated that it is not concerned about Intel 18A and believes its current 3-nanometer process will be superior to Intel 18A.It seems like you've included some non-text elements in your request for translation. Please provide the text you'd like translated into English, and I'll be happy to assist you.