Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation

Speaking from personal experience, many director-level and above positions at Intel, especially in growth related areas are filled through nepotism and professional connections. I've never seen a headline about Intel’s decline and thought, 'Wow, how could that happen?'

> it’s a regular occurrence for Intel to announce a bold new venture to try to claim some new territory, and just as regular that they announce they’re halting that venture in the name of “consolidating” and “focusing on their core.” [...] [Intel's new thing's] expected lifespan is shorter than the average Google product.

You got there in the end. You get the same outcome with the same corporate incentive.

Both Intel and Google prioritize {starting something new} over {growing an existing thing}, in terms of corporate promotions and rewards, and therefore employees and leaders self-optimize to produce the repeated behavior you see.

The way to fix this would be to decrease the rewards for starting a new thing and increase the rewards for evolving and growing an existing line of business.

But, well, it was a ten-year bet: Altera was acquired in 2015.

If they could not figure how to make it profitable, maybe somebody else should try. (Of course I don't think that the PE company is going to do just that.)

M&A churn is a way for management to monetize their power. Efficacy is a distant second concern.

This seems to be common for corporate America in general. I used to work at a YC startup. We kiiiiiinda maaaaaaaybe ran out of money (not my department) and happened to get bought by a large investor that also happens to be a US-based hardware manufacturer. Two years and countless reorgs later, they laid everyone off and as far as I know, are no longer in the business of selling the software products they bought. They never figured out how software worked, never had anyone managining the division for more than 6 months, and got bored. I think they thought by moving everyone over to Microsoft Word and Windows laptops (peppered with a half-hearted threat about RTO), they would just magically make billions of dollars the first month. It didn't happen.

I am beginning to think M&A are just some sort of ego thing for bored megacorp execs, rather than serious attempts to add efficiency and value to the marketplace. (Prove me wrong, bored megacorp execs. I'll wait.)

And Intel's acquisitions kill off promising startups. At least Altera is being sort of spun off instead of outright destroyed.

My personal theory is that desktop / laptop / server x86 (usually) is such a giant money printer that a) Intel can invest in anything (Altera, antivirus, Optane...) but b) when they do, they quickly realise that this isn't a giant profit margin machine like x86, so why bother?

They fuck their customers when they do that. A good friend of mine had a product designed around Quark that was about to go into production when Intel pulled the rug out from under him.

> [...] my color changing Altera mug (that's long stopped changing color) most days. PE ruins everything [...]

I don't think PE is responsible for that one.

Mug? Well I got a Cubic Cyclonium- annoyingly no current tools support it and even the last version which did is no longer available.

https://datasheet.octopart.com/CUBIC-CYCLONIUM-Altera-datash...

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Agree on both. As things like the PIO on the rp line of micros gets more common, micros will have IO that can match FPGAs. For low end, micros are generally good enough or gain NPU compute cores. It’s the IO that differentiates FPGAs.

So Intel found optimists who think they can make Altera more competitive? It's a success. Success with Intel products would be better, and excellence at M&A is hard to convert into excellence at chipmaking, but it's better than nothing.

It seems FPGA can now do things for LLM's so there might be some future in that

https://www.achronix.com/blog/accelerating-llm-inferencing-f...

>wonder who will lead the way to fix these abhorrent toolchains these FPGA companies force upon developers.

Some FPGA vendors are contributing to and relying, partially or completely, on the open source stack (mainly yosys+nextpnr).

It is still perceived as not being "as good" as the universally hated proprietary tools, but it's getting there.

You worked at Xilinx and you're not aware that FPGA is not a growing segment?

Yeah I personally wondered if AMD was just copying Intel, because apparently every CPU manufacturer also needs to manufacture FPGAs, or they actually have a long term strategy where it is essential for both the FPGA and CPU departments to cooperate.

I think Xilinx did a fine job with their AI Engines and AMD decided to integrate a machine learning focused variant on their laptops as a result. The design of the intel NPU is nowhere near as good as AMD's. I have to say that AMD is not a software company though and while the hardware is interesting, their software support is nonexistent.

Also, if you're worried about FPGAs that doesn't really make much sense, since Effinix is killing it.

Altera toolchain was a tad nicer than xilinx as of 2020, just saying. Still horrible, but at least the IDE wasn't a laggy Electron abomination.

Alteras tools seemed more civilized than Xilinx's, in my limited experience.

"In December 2015, Intel acquired Altera for $16.7 billion in cash." $21.5 bn inflation adjusted. Amazing ten year performance.

Or they got what they wanted from it and are selling off the rest, like when Google bought Motorola Wireless for the Patents then sold off the non-googly employees, culture, and brand for cheap.

I was excited, too. I was also excited when Intel announced Larrabee.

That was before I learnt about the many and varied ways in which Intel sabotages itself, and released that Intel's underperformance has little to do with a lack of good technical ideas or talent.

I.e. I was young and naive. I am now considerably less young, and at least a little less naive.

There was some hope at the time that FPGAs could be used in a lot more applications in the data center. It is likely still feasible. Remember Hennessy published:

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~wl/teachlocal/arch/papers/cacm19go...

And maybe this is/was a pipe dream - maybe there aren't enough people with the skills to have a "golden age of architecture". But MSFT was deploying FPGAs in the data center and there were certainly hopes and dreams this would become a big thing.

It made their stock pop for a while which was all that mattered to Brian Krzanich who took the bonus and left the mess in the hands of Bob Swan who did the same things and left the mess ... (recursion her).

It was a forced acquisition, iirc they made promises to Altera to get them to use their foundry, failed to keep those promises and could either get sued and embarrassed or just buy Altera outright for about what they were worth before the deal.

> Intel soon discovered the obvious, which is that customers with applications well-suited to FPGAs already use FPGAs.

So selling FPGA's was a bad move? Or was the purchase price just wildly out-of-line with the--checking...$9.8B annual market that's expected to rise to $23.3B by 2030?

Do you think AMD's decision to buy Xilinx was any better or not?

If AMD did the same thing years later, was it really that foolish?

> Intel soon discovered the obvious, which is that customers with applications well-suited to FPGAs already use FPGAs.

Yes, but pairing an FPGA somewhat tightly integrated with an actually powerful x86 CPU would have made an interesting alternative to the usual FPGA+some low end ARM combo that's common these days.

FPGAs might not be ideal, but AMD's NPU IP originated with Xilinx.

Intel was an early player to so many massive industries (e.g. XScale, GPGPU, hybrid FPGA SoCs). Intel abandoned all of them prematurely and has been left playing catch-up every time. We might be having a very different discussion if literally any of them had succeeded.

Not all market share are equal, like iphone vs. android. Also, the value for the leader will cost more than the second in line.

The FPGA market shifted. For a brief moment they were allowed to be on BOMs of end user devices due to the rest of the computing field lagging behind somewhat. That period, as far as I can tell, is over.

My anecdotal example would be high end broadcast audio processors. These do quite a bit beyond the actual processing of audio, in particular, into baseband or even RF signal generation.

In any case these devices used to be fully analog, then when they first went digital were a combination of DSPs for processing and FPGAs for signal output. Later generations dropped the DSP and did everything in larger FPGAs as the larger FPGAs became available. Later generations dropped the whole stack and just run on an 8 core Intel processor using real time linux and some specialized real time signal processing software with custom designed signal generators.

The high core and high frequency CPUs became good enough and getting custom made chips became exceptionally cheap as well. FPGAs became rather pointless in this pipline.

The US military, for a time, had a next generation radio specification that specifically called for the use of FPGAs, as that would allow them to make manufacturer agnostic radios and custom software for them. That never panned out but it shows the peak use of FPGAs to manage the constraints of this time period.

If only someone could have come up with a plausibly profitable use-case for advanced FPGA's and highly performant, efficient, real-time processing or hardware acceleration in those intervening years? What are ya gonna do?

I've updated the title as best as I could within the constraints of the max length.