Intel's interest in Altera is one way to protect its position in the data centre. Until lately, Intel was the only big player in data centre processors. However, the launch by ARM a couple of years ago of the 64bit v8 architecture opened the field up to competition.
The challenge for data centre operators is respond more quickly to search requests, whilst keeping cost and energy consumption under control. CPUs alone won't bring the performance gains necessary, so companies are looking to other solutions; primarily FPGAs or general purpose GPUs (GPGPUs). While GPGPUs have been deployed, FPGAs appear to meet the needs more closely and consume 20% of the power drawn by a GPGPU.
Intel has already announced a multichip module with a Xeon processor and an FPGA. It is also Altera's fab partner at the 14nm node, where it will be making the so called Generation 10 - Stratix 10 and Arria 10 - FPGAs.
There is now speculation about Xilinx' fate; if Altera is swallowed up by Intel, would a rival company be pushed to acquire Xilinx?
Should the deal happen, it would be another case of what goes around comes around; in the 1990s, many companies were looking to address the rapidly growing demand for programmable logic devices - and one of them was Intel.
