Intel Launches Altera, Its New Standalone FPGA Company

What’s New: Today, Intel announced the official launch of Altera, its new standalone FPGA company. During the FPGA Vision Webcast, Chief Executive Officer Sandra Rivera and Chief Operating Officer Shannon Poulin unveiled their strategy to secure leadership across a $55 billion-plus market opportunity; to expand the company’s portfolio, including the only FPGA with AI built into the fabric; and to help solve mounting customer challenges. They also announced Altera as the new company’s brand.

“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 center, embedded, industrial, automotive and mil-aero market segments.”

Why It Matters: Altera’s expanded portfolio and roadmap better address the growth in the target FPGA markets across cloud, network and edge, while simultaneously enhancing the best-in-class Quartus Prime software and easy-to-incorporate AI capabilities to capitalize this fast-growing application segment. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is creating new complexities and opportunities across all industries. Altera is addressing those opportunities with FPGA AI Suite and OpenVINO, which generate optimized intellectual property (IP) based on standard frameworks like TensorFlow and Pytorch. Altera’s FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) provide flexible solutions to better address changing market demands, such as seamlessly integrating critical AI inferencing capabilities, and to better intercept evolving standards, like PCI Express, CXL, Ethernet and 6G wireless.

How It Works: Altera’s solutions are optimized to target a broad range of markets and use cases, ranging from networking and communications infrastructure to low-power embedded applications. Today, Altera announced new products and services catering to customer needs, including:

• 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.

More Context: To learn more about Altera, check out the Intel FPGA Vision Webcast Replay, available at 6 a.m. PST March 1, 2024.