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Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

Everyone commenting here DOES realize that Intel acquired Altera relatively recently and is intending on releasing a new series of FPGAs and SOC chips correct? (Cyclone, Arria, Stratix lines). I imagine this is more about centralizing efforts on what was previously a major competitor to Xilinx. People that are only aware of the CPU market need not chime in unless they actually have information to add.

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You DO realize that acquisitions aren't the best indicator.

Microsoft famously acquired Danger Mobile and then crushed it destroying the first widely adopted smartphone tech for consumers.

If Microsoft could be so short sighted that they ceded their market to Apple and Google I think it's safe to say that Intel is incompetent enough to bungle these acquisitions.

Right which is why I'm supplanting that observation with news recently announced about the new line of chips slated for release in Q3/Q4 this year.

The OP wasn't saying that acquisitions are an indicator of anything. His point is Intel is looking at other business directions, contrary to the the parent comment.

Intel used to make DRAM, and it transitioned its business to CPUs. Perhaps Intel is doing the same here, it noticed that it's future in is FPGAs now.

Also, there are tons of acquisitions in tech that were successful. Not sure you can mesure the future of any business on that.

>Microsoft famously acquired Danger Mobile and then crushed it destroying the first widely adopted smartphone tech for consumers.

Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, 5 years after Andy Rubin left to start Android [0]. 2008 was also the year after iOS was released and the year Android was released. Too little, too late.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Inc.

Yeah, honestly at the time of the Danger purchase, Danger wasn't that dangerous. It was mostly a manufacurer of really dweeby phones, sorry, hip-tops, that seemed more like a nod to the men's waist packs of the 90s.

My numbers may be wrong, but Intel spent almost $17B for acquiring a company whose net profits annually are $0.5B. At the current rate, it'll take 30 years to break even. Intel's probably betting that the FPGA market will grow - but by how much? Even if it grows 4-fold, the acquisition won't make net money for Intel for another 8 years.

How exactly are FPGAs, a technology far more arcane and less cost-effective than GPUs, going to save Intel's hegemony? Any suggestions for further reading on that notion?

I've programmed both FPGAs and GPUs. They are entirely different and shouldn't be compared with the exception of the small-ish class of tasks that map equally well to both (smaller than you think). FPGAs are more suitable to, say, prototype a new GPU or some other custom IC. It's more "arcane" and "less cost-effective" by definition because you are one abstraction level lower. For further reading, you really need to understand how a hardware design and manufacturing pipeline works to see why FPGAs and GPUs are so apples and oranges.

For consumers it won't really matter, but for server applications this can be profound.

If Intel can clean up the tooling for these things it could make them a lot more popular.

And mobileye, an SOC optimized for low(ish)-power detection and tracking of visual targets.

Now I am laughing at all this speculation and the rage that is happening inside of Intel. I also laugh at all the doom and gloom thrown at Intel when they didn't know what was happening with Intel acquisitions.

> People that are only aware of the CPU market need not chime in unless they actually have information to add.

I can just add that Intel's documentation in the IoT chips is seriously lacking.

> I can just add that Intel's documentation in the IoT chips is seriously lacking.

I just find it odd that in the absence of information, commentators feel like they have something to contribute anyways haha

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