Eight years after acquiring Altera, a provider of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology for approximately $16.7 billion, Intel announced plans to relaunch Altera as a standalone FPGA company. Since the acquisition in late 2015, the former Altera has operated as Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (PSG).
Sandra Rivera will serve as the new Altera’s CEO and Shannon Poulin will be Chief Operating Officer.
In addition, Altera announced the following new products and services:
- Agilex 9 is now in volume production. It offers the industry’s fastest data converters, which are ideal for radar and military-aerospace applications that require high-bandwidth mixed-signal FPGAs.
- Agilex 7 F-series and I-series devices are released to production. With 2x better fabric performance per watt versus competing FPGAs, they are tailored toward high-bandwidth compute applications like data center, networking and defense.
- Agilex 5 is now broadly available. It delivers the only FPGA fabric infused with AI, best-in-class performance and 1.6x better performance per watt versus competing products. It is geared toward embedded and edge applications.
- Coming soon: Agilex 3. It will bring a leading value, low-power line of FPGAs to low-complexity functions for cloud, communications and intelligent edge applications.
“As customers deal with increasingly complex technological challenges and work to differentiate themselves from their competitors and accelerate time to value, we have an opportunity to reinvigorate the FPGA market. We’re leading with a bold, agile and customer-obsessed approach to deliver programmable solutions and accessible AI across a broad range of applications in the comms, cloud, data center, embedded, industrial, automotive and mil-aero market segments,” stated Sandra Rivera, chief executive officer of Altera.
In the AI domain, 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.