After months of negotiation and completion of legal formalities, recently Intel has officially confirmed their biggest deal since they established, it was that this company acquired Altera with the price up to 16.7 billion dollars.
One of the ways to approach to the new technology without going through the R & D (research & development) is acquiring other technology companies, and Intel knows they need to do like that to catch up with technology trends in the future. From now Altera will become an instance of Intel called “Programmable Solutions Group” - PSG and be led by the former vice president Altera, Dan McNamara. The key of this deal is Altera will help bring FPGA technology to Intel.
FPGA is microprocessor technology composed of logic blocks, the function of these blocks can be completely reprogrammed even when they reach to consumers. They can perform some complex tasks, such as arithmetic, image processing, data analysis, search system,... Some logic blocks even have the memory to increase working efficiency.
Microsoft and Baidu are two of the representatives using FPGA to help their CPU Xeon increase calculation performance, accuracy and search speed of Bing search engine server, increase processing cloud computing tasks as on Xbox One.
Almost people do not know who Altera is and what FPGA is. However, now you know these technologies are present around us for so long, not to mention that their applicability is very high. FPGA appears everywhere in different servers, every day people receive the support of FPGA when using internet without even realizing.
With FPGA technology, Intel will have more advanced improvements for CPU, by increasing the number of graphics processing cores and integrated acceleration sensors. FPGA also helps Intel enhance business activity in the server market. While the personal computer market has gradually slowed down, the war in the mobile market with tablets and smartphones is increasingly fierce, server chips are still earning huge profits for the company, so continuing to grow it is a right strategy.
Intel hopes to get a certain position in the market of Internet of Things (IoT), and FPGA is the foundation for that ambition, such as the system of factory automation or smart cities. Owning Altera helps Intel become a key platform for IoT devices and sell more products.
In particular, the acquisition will affect directly Intel’s competitors in using Altera. Now IBM and ARM will have to find other options to use FPGA on their servers, which is why Intel do not cooperate but definitive purchase Altera at any cost.
After this deal, Intel will be more exclusive about FPGA technology on chip. It is hard to say if they take advantage of this opportunity to raise prices and regain the profit of sluggish standard computer processor or not, but Intel buying FPGA and continuing to develop this technology is quite beneficial for us, who use standard computer and mobile devices. If the server is upgraded, the speed of searching or handling web will be better.
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