Without arguing the merits of the Altera investment or divestment, a common pattern for Intel seems to be a wild see-sawing between an aggressive and a defensive market posture - it’s a regular occurrence for Intel to announce a bold new venture to try to claim some new territory, and just as regular that they announce they’re halting that venture in the name of “consolidating” and “focusing on their core.” The consequence is that they never give new ventures time to actually succeed, so they just bleed money creating things they murder in the cradle, and nobody born before last Tuesday is investing in bothering to learn the new Intel thing because its expected lifespan is shorter than the average Google product.

Intel either needs to focus or they need to be bold (and I’d actually prefer they be bold - they’ve started down some cool paths over time), but what they really need is to make up their goddamn minds and stop panicking every other quarter that their “ten-year bets” from last quarter haven’t paid off yet.

Rest in Peace Altera I guess? I still drink out of my color changing Altera mug (that's long stopped changing color) most days. PE ruins everything so it's only a matter of time before they're gutted and sold for scraps by the vultures at Silver Lake. (though honestly the writing was on the wall since the Intel acquisition I had held onto some hope) If only we had a functioning government interested in actually maintaining our technological dominance and enforcing/expanding antitrust legislation. I wrote my first Verilog on an Altera chip and I'll remember them fondly.

As someone who's worked at Xilinx before and after the merger, it's a surprise they were even able to sell it for that much. Altera has been noncompetitive to Xilinx in performance and to Lattice in terms of low-end/low-power offerings for at least the last 2 generations.

I'm concerned about the future of FPGAs and wonder who will lead the way to fix these abhorrent toolchains these FPGA companies force upon developers.

For those keeping score at home, 51% sold at a total valuation of $8.75B, which means they are bringing in around $4.5B, and recognizing a loss of roughly 50% on what was their biggest deal ever when it took place in 2015.

It was a silly acquisition in the first place, and their justification clearly came from a coke-addled fever dream.

Intel soon discovered the obvious, which is that customers with applications well-suited to FPGAs already use FPGAs.