Everything I've heard about the Altera deal is that Intel has basically just been milking existing customers, rather than attracting new ones. If AMD does more with Xilinx sooner than they did with ATI[1] it could be good strategic move. If they start making FPGAs standard on their CPUs (short term on the enterprise stuff, longer term on everything) in the same way FPUs are, this could provide them with a significant advantage both in CPUs and GPUs. The other half of the equation would be to open up the FPGAs enough to allow 3rd party tool chains so that they could be at least as open as CPU ISAs. If they keep the Xilinx (and most other FPGA manufacturers) business model of 100% proprietary devices and toolchains, I think people will look back on this acquisition years from now the same way they do ATI and ask 'why?'. Basically it seems rather smart if they want the tech to enhance their existing offerings but rather dumb (especially for the price paid) to keep the FPGA business as a silo.

[1] The rationale of getting into the GPU business made a lot of sense but here we are 15 years later and it's arguable AMD has largely squandered the opportunity. Even in APUs where they should be slaughtering Intel, AMD continues to hobble them by putting previous gen GPU cores in them. This was during a decade and a half when Intel's iGPUs were fairly weak and nVidia had nothing to counter with... smart move AMD!