Intel is increasingly looking for buyers for Altera
Until now, Intel wanted to keep its FPGA division, but now it is reportedly to be sold off, even partially if necessary.
FPGA board from Intel, the Agilex chip contains Altera technology
(Image: Intel)
The former chip giant Intel is still in crisis. The company is in the red, cutting or postponing investments and laying off employees. When announcing far-reaching cost-cutting measures, CEO Pat Gelsinger did not yet talk about selling parts of the company – This is now said to have changed.
As CNBC has learned from unnamed sources, Intel is currently considering the sale of part of its FPGA division. The company formed this division by purchasing the then leading company Altera in 2015. At the time, Intel paid 16.7 billion US dollars for this; the division is now to be valued at 17 billion US dollars. According to the report, Intel would also be happy with a minority stake.
Altera was founded at the beginning of 2024
Preparations for the sale of Altera were already underway at the beginning of 2024 when Intel revived the company name. Before this, the brand names of the products had also disappeared and Intel marketed them under new names. At the time of this relaunch, it was also expected that Intel might take Altera public as an independent company. Now there no longer seems to be any money for this.
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A "Field Programmable Gate Array" (FPGA) is a special chip with logic gates that can be switched by software. The chip can, for example, simulate other processors, but run at a much slower speed than the original. However, this is done with a defined speed and behavior, which is not the case with a purely software-based emulation, even through the host operating system. Many modern retro game consoles, such as those from Analogue, are based on FPGAs. In other, higher-volume applications, however, the importance of FPGAs has declined recently because there are many smaller and much cheaper chips for tasks that FPGAs used to perform.
(nie)
