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They did not ignore the low end by choice.

The entire story of Altera inside Intel can be summarized as:

Intel fabs make amazing promises about process performance and availability. Altera builds their product stack on that. In the end, the fabs fail to deliver either performance, or sufficient amount of manufacturing capability. Now Altera has to pick which products they want to ship. They obviously can the low end. Even the high end that ships is horribly late, because of manufacturing issues.

There would have been massive demand for the combined Intel+Altera products. Many large customers built their future based on the marketing promises Intel made, and when they couldn't deliver, those customers had to redevelop everything on something else. As an example, look up Nokia Reefshark.

Do you have some citable sources for this? It sounds like it might very well be true, but, well, …

It was widely reported, e.g. https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/09/23/altera-releases-stra...

Any use at NVidia for that tech? If the biggest problem is process, Altera should be shopping around for a company with an in on manufacturing at TSMC. (I doubt AMD's an option, since they already subsumed Xilinx.)

I've had Intel sales people tell me that the entire low end of some their marketed FPGA/ASIC products have never and likely will never be sold

> nobody really wants FPGA fabric on a CPU.

Not true... Xilinx sells a lot of their Zynq, MPSoC, and RFSoC chips. Though I guess those are more CPU on an FPGA.

Intel doesn’t really make low end CPUs like that though. The Zynq is an awesome little chip and there really isn’t anything on the market to compare it to as far as I know. From my perspective sitting on the sidelines of this industry, Intel went all-in assuming companies would want FPGAs in the data centre the same way they want GPUs in the data centre and that bet didn’t pan out.

Sounds like intel is mismanaged.

It certainly was. It remains to be seen if it is.

If they'd been made a performant (as in, non-x86) low-end CPU, then they wouldn't have lost mobile and be competing with ARM now.

Intel of the past few decades learned the wrong lesson from their history. You can climb the value chain to riches, but once you're at the top you still need to seed the earth for the next generation of profits. And that means cheap entry points and volume.

The low end always eats the high end, always. Intel sold StrongARM to Marvell and that is some of the Arm IP they are fighting against in hyperscaler space.

https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3574013/marvell-exits-t...

Intel does have the Cyclone 5 SoC which integrates Cortex-A9 cores much like the Zynq 7000 series. That product predates the acquisition though and they don't seem to have released anything to compete with newer entries in the Zynq lineup

But the bet was customers would buy Xeons with an FPGA block that would "do magic". What magic it would do and how you'd program it in a sane way was never specified in great detail. In any case for those that really want this it turns out you can put the FPGA on the end of a regular PCIe link and get all the same benefits.

Edit: By the way there is some niche research of the FPGA in core (which don't work if the FPGA is over PCIe). This paper describes a way to rearrange memory using a programmable FPGA-based memory controller to optimize database table accesses: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14349.pdf

Intel suffers from the build it and they will come flaw of engineering.

I want multiple FPGAs in the CPU. Replace the PMU with an FPGA, replace the MMU with an FPGA, and by replace I mean augment and extend. Of course an FPGA can't do all the work of fixed blocks.

The ultimate problem is politics inside organizations and the lack of any sort of concrete creative thinking.

That Intel isn't incorporating Altera into IFS and allowing IFS customers to include FPGA fabric into their designs is predictable but both astonishing.

x86 and Altera as library IP only available on IFS would give them another 10 years of runway.

Intel had the same market segmentation and lack of imagination in how they applied Optane. Heck, Optane should have had FPGA fabric in each dimm. It appears that each sub-sku has their own fiefdom and their own P&L that ignores ecosystem effects.

Intel needs to be cleaned out.

Words of mouth I’ve seen on this was that the whole FPGA craze was a war on 5G tower equipment, which AMD/Xilinx took all, and Altera is now a dead weight on Intel.

Pretty sure the emulator community would be pretty psyched about a consumer priced fpga.

> They have better tools, documentation, and support than Gowin, who is a recent Chinese FPGA upstart using stolen Lattice IP and hires.

Naive of me to ask, but how are they allowed to sell anywhere outside of China?

> stolen Lattice IP and hires

If this is true, then the bitstream for Gowin and Lattice parts would be similar and both are being actively reverse engineered to be supported by OSS tools.

It would be nice to see more evidence of this.

I don't think there is any evidence of this. Open Source tools fully support Lattice (low end) FPGAs, and support for Gowin FPGAs is not quite as mature. It seems that many of the initial FPGA patents have expired, and that's why many small FPGA vendors are appearing. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I agree. IP theft is a bold claim, that is why I was asking for more citations.

Not only are the patent expired, but there are three projects that generate FPGA fabrics programmatically. FPGAs are extremely easy to construct as they are a repeating lattice.

They have announced the new Agilex 3 line, which should include some CPLD price point parts and be a real rebirth for ~$100/unit modern devices.

Lets see I guess... I'm not holding my breath, but it'd be great to not use Vivado's slow ass Java IDE one day. Quartus is light years faster seemingly.

What is even a "low-end" application of FPGAs, if you don't mind my asking?

Some embedded stuff where the FPGA is used to implement some logic on I/Os, some processing that needs to be fast or implement some i2c, CAN, SPI controller trough IP core. Basically a more flexible way than having different chips on the board.