Altera, a standalone FPGA company that Intel launched earlier this year to capitalize on a $55 billion-plus market opportunity and expand its portfolio of products, including what is said to be the only FPGA with AI built into the fabric, may be sold off by its owner soon, according to a new report that discusses how Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and other key executives will be presenting a new cost-cutting plan this month to the company’s board of directors, one that aims to remove unnecessary businesses and revamp capital spending. Altera, which “prioritizes customers with end-to-end FPGAs, accessible AI, software, and supply resilience,” was only launched in February this year, according to a press release from Intel.
From a report:
- “The plan will include ideas on how to shave overall costs by selling businesses, including its programmable chip unit Altera, that Intel can no longer afford to fund from the company’s once-sizeable profit.”
- “The proposal does not yet include plans to split Intel and sell off its contract manufacturing operation, or foundry, to a buyer such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to the source and another person familiar with the matter.”
- “Intel has already broken off its foundry business from its design business, and has been reporting its financial results separately since the first calendar quarter of this year.”
- “The proposal Gelsinger and others will present is likely to include plans to further reduce the company’s capital spending on factory expansion. The pitch may include plans to pause or altogether halt its $32 billion factory in Germany, a project that has reportedly been delayed, the source said.”
A promo for Altera:
Intel on its FGPA company:
Altera’s expanded portfolio and roadmap better address the growth in the target FPGA markets across cloud, network and edge, while simultaneously enhancing the best-in-class Quartus Prime software and easy-to-incorporate AI capabilities to capitalize this fast-growing application segment. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is creating new complexities and opportunities across all industries. Altera is addressing those opportunities with FPGA AI Suite and OpenVINO, which generate optimized intellectual property (IP) based on standard frameworks like TensorFlow and Pytorch. Altera’s FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) provide flexible solutions to better address changing market demands, such as seamlessly integrating critical AI inferencing capabilities, and to better intercept evolving standards, like PCI Express, CXL, Ethernet and 6G wireless.