Intel Completes Altera Buy, Eyes Next-Gen Data Centers and IoT

Though not quite as big as Dell's historic $67 billion bid for storage giant EMC, Intel just completed a mammoth acquisition of its own. On Dec. 28, the chipmaker announced it had finalized the $16.7 billion acquisition of San Jose, Calif.-based Altera, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) vendor. The companies first announced the deal on June 1.

Saddled with big data, and anticipating even greater volumes of data with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), businesses are growing increasingly interested in using FPGA processors. Unlike x86 server chips, FPGAs can be reconfigured to perform a specific task, wasting few if any compute cycles on unnecessary processing.

For Intel, Altera's FPGA technology will help the company usher in a new generation of server chips for the data center.
"Within the data center we see an opportunity to combine our Xeon microprocessors with FPGAs to significantly improve performance, and through integration, reduce the cost," said Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, in a June 1 conference call. "That combination will position us to address emerging workloads in creative new ways, adding value to our customers, and these are products that our customers have been looking for." The first FPGA-enabled Xeons are expected to show up in limited quantities during 2016.