Leading chipmaker Intel announced the new standalone FPGA (field-programmable gate arrays) company called Altera during the recent FPGA Vision Webcast. This is Intel’s new brand, which is touted as the “only FPGA with AI built into the fabric.” Here are the details.
Intel Introduces a New Brand
With Altera, Intel wants to become one of the leaders in the $55 billion-plus FPGA market and wants to expand and grow across verticals like cloud, network, and edge.
The new company is also working on Quartus Prime software and AI capabilities that are easy to incorporate and grow in the app market. As AI is gaining momentum in the industry, Altera wants to cash in on the trend with its FPGA AI Suite and OpenVINO.
These can optimise intellectual property (IP) based on standard frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch. Altera’s FPGAs can also be customised to integrate newer standards like PCI Express, CXL, Ethernet, and 6G wireless.
“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 centre, embedded, industrial, automotive and mil-aero market segments," Sandra Rivera, chief executive officer of Altera, said.
Furthermore, Altera can cater to networking and communications segments. Its portfolio includes new products like Agilex 5 (makes the only FPGA with AI), Agilex 9 (data converters for radar and military-aerospace applications, and Agilex 7 F-series and I-series. The brand is planning to introduce Agilex 3, which will bring low-power FPGAs for cloud, communications, and intelligent edge applications.
