According to the company’s CEO, Sandra Rivera, the standalone programmable chip unit which started operating at the beginning of this year will be rebranded ‘Altera, an Intel Company’ and will, according to Rivera, look to fill a growing niche in the fast-developing AI market.
Intels’ current Agilex line of programmable chips is produced by Intel Foundry, the company's contract manufacturing arm.
Rivera said the programmable chips being designed by Altera would be useful for AI applications and computing tasks that are not addressed by purpose built custom processors or the general use AI chips that are manufactured by the likes of Nvidia.
However, while the size of the market for programmable chips was estimated to be worth $10bn last year, how big the opportunity for programmable chips is not possible to gauge accurately due to a lack of third-party data.
