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The Altera (FPGA) acquisition could have made sense, but they never really followed through and now it's being spun off again.

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There were some technical issues with the follow-through that they didn't foresee. CPUs need to closely manage their power usage to be able to extract maximum computing power, and leaving a big chunk of static power on the table in case the FPGA needs it. The idea of putting an FPGA on a die was mostly killed by that.

Regarding other plans, QPI and UPI for cache coherent FPGAs were pretty infeasible to do at the sluggish pace that they need in the logic fabric. CXL doesn't need a close connection between the two chips (or the companies), and just uses the PCIe lanes.

FPGA programming has always been very hard, too, so the dream of them everywhere is just not happening.

That was not the point of the Altera acquisition. The point was the fill Intel's fabs, but the fab fiasco left Altera/Intel-FPGA without a product to sell (Stratix 10 -- 10nm -- got years of delay because of that). Meanwhile Xilinx was racing ahead on TSMC's ever shrinking process.

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