Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) is a leading company in innovative custom logic solutions.It is headquartered in Silicon Valley and invented the world’s first reprogrammable logic device in 1984.ALTR has already developed into a company who has over 2,600 employees in 19 countries. Meanwhile, it is providing even more ingenious custom logic solutions and addressing a range of concerns, from power consumption to performance to cost for customers in a wide variety of industries which includes automotive, broadcast, computer and storage, consumer, industrial, medical, military, test and measurement, wireless, and wireline.Besides, Altera’s product ranges also contain fully integrated software development tools, versatile embedded processors, optimized intellectual property (IP) cores, reference designs examples, and a variety of development kits,etc.
Programmable solutions enable designers of electronic systems to quickly and cost-effectively innovate, stand out from their markets and ultimately win. Provides FPGAs, SoCs, CPLDs, and complementary technologies such as power solutions to deliver high-value solutions to customers around the world.
Intel and Altera announced on June 1, 2015, that they had entered into a definitive agreement under which Intel would acquire Altera. The transaction closed December 28, 2015. The acquisition couples Intel’s leading-edge products and manufacturing process with Altera’s leading field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The combination enables new classes of products that meet customer needs in the data center and Internet of Things (IoT) market segments.
On April 19, 18, Intel announced that its FGPA has been officially used in mainstream data center OEMs. Specifically, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R640, R740, and R740XD servers integrate Intel FPGAs and are ready for large-scale deployment; Fujitsu's upcoming PRIMERGY RX2540 M4 also incorporates Intel FGPA, which is about to be released. Key customers have been supported for early use.
The Intel FGPA mentioned here mainly refers to the Intel Arria 10 GX Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC); this accelerator card was released in October 2017; in addition, Intel also provides OME vendors. An Intel Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon scalable processors with FPGAs. The combination of the two forms a complete hardware-software combined FPGA solution.
In terms of application effects, Intel FPGA blessing can help OEM data vendors significantly improve performance and speed. For example, Intel partner Levyx built an Intel FPGA-based backtesting solution for financial institutions; Intel said Levy's architects and software compared to traditional Spark implementations with Intel PAC and accelerated stacks The developer's algorithm execution speed and option calculation speed were increased by eight times and twice, respectively.
In terms of database acceleration, with the support of Intel PAC, the real-time data analysis acceleration using Swarm 64 can be increased by more than 20 times, the traditional data storage can be speeded up by more than 2 times, and the storage acceleration can be increased by more than 3 times.
Of course, in addition to the above two scenarios, Intel also said that its FPGA solution can also be applied to data analysis, deep learning, video transcoding, network security, genetic research and many other scenarios; in addition, in addition to Dell and Fujitsu, Intel also Actively promote cooperation with other data center OEMs in FPGA.
Altera is product portfolio consists of FPGA, SoC, CPLCD, and power management.
FPGA - Field Programmable Gate Array
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