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Comment by akuma73 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand this deal.

Altera and Intel already have a fab agreement and Intel is desperate to get customers into their mothballed fabs.

All this talk of technology collaboration could be accomplished with strategic partnerships/licensing that would certainly be less than $16.7B.

This looks like a case of a foundry player buying their customer to prevent it from defecting to TSMC in the future. To me this is a sign of weakness.

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Altera and Intel already have a fab agreement and Intel is desperate to get customers into their mothballed fabs.

If they can't get customers into them, they can get their own products made in them.

Rumor has it that Altera was unhappy with Intel's process and was going to bail. Intel was so dependent on their cooperation that acquisition started to look good.

There is a lot of truth to this - Intel's process (and their tools!) is a FUCKING NIGHTMARE

I think its more core to Intel's product strategy than this. Intel will build more heterogeneous compute elements on a single die (CPU, GPU and now programmable routing fabric). Intel learned the first time to buy not build (Larabee).

Altera has been with TSMC since forever, and in their latest chip they had disastrous results. TSMC just can't compete with Intel's process when it comes to making high quality digital chips. This is a VERY VERY good move for Altera, not sure about Intel though.

Not sure if this is entirely accurate. Intel's process tend to be optimized towards high performance chips since this is where the big margins are.

I'm not sure they are ready to devote production capacity (and process development resources) towards very lower power products which are also less profitable.

That was one of the reasons they failed when trying to enter the cellular market.

> I'm not sure they are ready to devote production capacity (and process development resources) towards very lower power products which are also less profitable.

Isn't that what they're already doing? What about things like the Quarks used in the Galileo and the Edison?

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