TO STAY RELEVANT, INTEL EXPLORES ITS BIGGEST TAKEOVER EVER
INTEL, THE WORLD’S largest chip maker, is in talks to acquire Silicon Valley chip builder Altera, according to a report from the The Wall Street Journal. And if such a deal goes through, it would be Intel’s largest takeover ever.
The Journal‘s story is thin on specifics. It doesn’t cite a specific source, and it says the talks are nowhere near complete. “Terms of the potential deal and its timing couldn’t be learned, and it is possible there ultimately won’t be one,” the paper reports. But the acquisition makes a lot of sense for Intel. Altera isn’t a big name, but it builds chips that represent the future of the massive data centers that power the internet.
“I am absolutely not surprised,” Jason Mars, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan whose research focuses on hardware used in the modern data center, says of the rumored deal.
Altera builds what are called FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays. These are chips you can program to perform very specific tasks, and they don’t require as much power or as much space as the chips that traditionally have powered our internet services. They’s why Microsoft used them to help power Bing. People like Mars believe these chips could help power a wide range of services, including the new breed of artificially intelligent services, such as Apple Siri and Microsoft Cortana.
“This is where the things are moving. And Intel is responding,” says Mars, who is part of a research team that recently published a paper showing FGPAs are far more efficient than traditional chips when running things like Siri and Cortana. Intel makes most of the chips that power our internet services today. But it doesn’t make FPGAs (though it has said it is exploring this type of silicon).
Intel declined to say anything about the The Journalstory, and Altera did not respond to a request for comment. But the two companies are longtime partners. About two years ago, they signed a deal for Altera to build future chips in Intel foundries, the enormously expensive plants where Intel manufactures chips. And, most notably, the two are collaborating on an experimental computer motherboard that includes traditional Intel server chips and Altera FPGAs.
The project is called HARP, short for Heterogeneous Architecture Research Platform. Mars and his team are applying to receive and test one of these boards. Although the world is moving toward thing like FPGAs, traditional server chips will continue to be used as well, and these boards explore ways of marrying the two. “It’s a very good move for Intel,” Mars says.
Many companies are already using smaller, simpler, more efficient chips to power certain services. As Microsoft uses FPGAs to help power Bing, Google and Facebook are using GPUs, or graphics processing units, to power various “machine learning” services, services that can, say, identify faces in photos or identify spoken words.
For Mars and others, these chips will play an even larger role in the data center as time goes on, and we may also see many data center machines powered by low-power chips based on those that run your cell phone today. All this creates a bit of a quandary for Intel. But the company is exploring all sorts of alternative chips. It may even buy a company that makes them.
