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Comment by brutus1213 | Hacker News Reader

I remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me .. Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap .. gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So much value being destroyed :(

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The Altera (FPGA) acquisition could have made sense, but they never really followed through and now it's being spun off again.

There were some technical issues with the follow-through that they didn't foresee. CPUs need to closely manage their power usage to be able to extract maximum computing power, and leaving a big chunk of static power on the table in case the FPGA needs it. The idea of putting an FPGA on a die was mostly killed by that.

Regarding other plans, QPI and UPI for cache coherent FPGAs were pretty infeasible to do at the sluggish pace that they need in the logic fabric. CXL doesn't need a close connection between the two chips (or the companies), and just uses the PCIe lanes.

FPGA programming has always been very hard, too, so the dream of them everywhere is just not happening.

That was not the point of the Altera acquisition. The point was the fill Intel's fabs, but the fab fiasco left Altera/Intel-FPGA without a product to sell (Stratix 10 -- 10nm -- got years of delay because of that). Meanwhile Xilinx was racing ahead on TSMC's ever shrinking process.

I remember when they bought a smart glasses company then refunded every buyer ever the full retail price. There hasn’t been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20 years now it seems. Just utterly unserious people.

> There hasn’t been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20 years now it seems.

Maybe Habana Labs?

I can't really tell if it's working out for Intel, but I do hear them mentioned now and then.

Isn't that true for virtually EVERY big tech merger? Like, which ones have actually worked?

Android and PA Semi have worked out pretty well...

Google built its core advertising ecosystem on acquisitions (Applied Semantics, DoubleClick, AdMob, etc) and extended it into the mobile space by buying Android.

Youtube was also an acquisition.

Haven't heard much about successful Google acquisitions lately though.

Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp and they were both home runs. Zuckerberg knows how to buy companies.

That’s a different type of acquisition, right? Buying your competition. If nothing else you’ve wiped out a competitor.

Even that sometimes flops (HP/Compaq)

Facebook bought their eventual competitors by making an offer they couldn't refuse. Zuck knows Metcalfe's law.

Instagram and WhatsApp are still popular with consumers though. Meta didn’t kill them, if anything they’ve grown significantly.

There are the occasional good ones, like instagram.

But I guess thats the problem - I had to provide an example

Mostly true, but there are exceptions:

Apple does really well on its rare acquisitions, but they aren't very public as they get successfully absorbed. PA Semi, Intrinsity, more I can't remember.

ATi and Xilinx have by all accounts worked out really well for AMD.

The iPod

Nvidia Mellanox

Broadcom is a good example of successful mergers.

i was a process engineer there in the early 2000's, they did crazy random shit then too! they had an 'internet tv' pc that was designed to play mp4's in 2001.

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