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Comment by nxobject | Hacker News Reader

A few things that I noticed in passing:

- Intel’s divesting from Altera;

- Intel seems to be eschewing the consumer device/computer market for more B2B custom collaborations, e.g. with AWS and hinted later on.

A lot of retrenchment from Intel. Once Foundry’s no longer embarrassing to Intel, though, what’s their plan for anticipating the future?

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Altera has been known but its so sad. They bought them less than a decade ago for $13B and did nothing with it. They really got themselves into a great position for Heterogeneous computing and then just did nothing.

It's depressing. This should be an age of new hardware, with near-memory computing and flexible architecture. Instead it's GPUs for the foreseeable future, Nvidia has a near monopoly, AMD seems uninterested (despite also owning Xilinx), and Intel's throwing in the towel.

I wanted to prototype a systolic array coupled with a DRAM slice to hold the weight matrix, but there's not even DRAM blocks distributed on any of the FPGAs I saw. I guess Xilinx has HBM but still not quite what I wanted.

Hold up, they didn't do nothing. They tried and failed. There were several attempts at packaging an FPGA with a CPU and none of them worked.

They tried a lot of things with Altera and failed. The real problem is the price they paid (it was more than $13B). At the time they bought it, Altera had net revenues of $0.5B. They simply paid too much to ever recoup the expense.

> - Intel’s divesting from Altera;

That's been in the works since last year.

https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fp...

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