Intel has just launched a new company that will focus on FPGA (field-programmable gate array) hardware called Altera. Along with the announcement of the new company, several products from Altera have been revealed including Agilex 9, Agilex 7 F-series and I-series, Agilex 5, and Agilex 3.
During Altera’s launch webcast, its CEO Sandra Rivera said that the company sees an opportunity to reinvigorate the FPGA market. She said that Altera will try to lead with “a bold, agile and customer-obsessed approach” to develop solutions for different applications including comms, cloud, data center, embedded, industrial, automotive, and mil-aero market segments.
Outlining the purpose of each of the Agilex products, Intel wrote:
- Agilex 9 is now in volume production. It offers the industry"s fastest data converters, which are ideal for radar and military-aerospace applications that require high-bandwidth mixed-signal FPGAs.
- Agilex 7 F-series and I-series devices are released to production. With 2x better fabric performance per watt versus competing FPGAs, they are tailored toward high-bandwidth compute applications like data center, networking and defense.
- Agilex 5 is now broadly available. It delivers the only FPGA fabric infused with AI, best-in-class performance and 1.6x better performance per watt versus competing products. It is geared toward embedded and edge applications.
- Coming soon: Agilex 3. It will bring a leading value, low-power line of FPGAs to low-complexity functions for cloud, communications and intelligent edge applications.
As a bit of background about Altera, the company was actually founded way back in 1983. In 2015, Intel decided to acquire it for $50 million and turned it into the new Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) unit. In October last year, Intel announced plans to spin out PSG into a separate company which it would hold majority ownership in and within three years would seek to take the company public.
We haven’t heard anything about an initial public offering (IPO) yet so that announcement will come later if it still intends to do that.
Source: Intel