Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation

In my experience Intel's WiFi and Bluetooth drivers on Linux are, by far, the best. They're reliably available on the latest kernel and they actually work. After having used other brands on Linux, I have no intention of getting non-intel WiFi or Bluetooth any time soon. The one time that I found a bug, emailing them about it got me in direct contact with the developers of the driver.

I had a different non-Intel WiFi card before where the driver literally permanently fried all occupied PCIe slots -- they never worked again and the problem happened right after installing the driver. I don't know how a driver such as this causes that but it looks like it did.

The team working on their Realsense depth cameras was doing great work on the SDK, in my opinion.

Frequent releases, GitHub repo with good enough user interaction, examples, bug fixing and feedback.

The affliction he’s imputing is born of absolute dominance over decades. Apple has never had the same level of dominance, and NVidia has only had it for two or three years.

It could possibly come to haunt NVidia or TSMC in decades to come.

A friend who developed a game engine from scratch and is familiar with inner workings and behavior of NVIDIA driver calls it an absolute circus of a driver.

Also, their latest consumer card launches are less then stellar, and the tricks they use to pump up performance numbers are borderline fraud.

As Gamers Nexus puts it "Fake prices for fake frames".

It's a bummer you've had poor experiences with ATI and later AMD, especially on a new system. I have an AMD laptop with Ryzen 7 7840U which includes a Radeon 780M for integrated graphics and it's been rock solid. I tested many old and new titles on it, albeit at medium-ish settings.

What kind of problems did you see on your laptop?

Did you time travel from 2015 or something? Haven't heard of anyone having AMD issues in a very long time...

Meanwhile PC gamers have no trouble using their AMD GPUs to play Windows games on Linux.

I wish I had an AMD card. Instead our work laptops are X1 extremes with discrete nvidia cards and they are absolutely infuriating. The external outputs are all routed through the nvidia card, so one frequently ends up with the fan blowing on full blast when plugged into a monitor. Moreover, when unplugging the laptop often fails to shutdown the discrete graphics card so suddenly the battery is empty (because the discrete card uses twice the power). The Intel card on the other hand seems to prevent S3 sleep when on battery, i.e. the laptop starts sleeping and immediately wakes up again (I chased it down to the Intel driver but couldn't get further).

And I'm not even talking about the hassle of the nvidia drivers on Linux (which admittedly has become quite a bit better).

All that just for some negligible graphics power that I'm never using on the laptop.

"within an organization and can cause division/animosity between teams"

Are you aware of what goes on in middle management? This is the normal state of affairs between managers.

If what you are saying is true, then .......

Why is there competition in the open marketplace? You have just validated my suggestion that internally companies operate like communists.

rewards for not fucking up an existing (monopoly) line of business

I can see why you have to be "special" to work at these places.

Most of these have very serious issues, especially with regards to labor violations and general treatment of employees.

> McAfee

I wouldn't call that a roaring success. Funnily enough, Intel played a major role in running McAfee into the ground.

With proper leadership, McAfee could've ended up in the position CrowdStrike is now.

Trying not to piss off the Chinese government, and in particular its intelligence services (in order to sell chips) is unfortunately not a good model for an antimalware business.

See item #6 here

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/valuation/mo...

If you hold stock in company A, and your current company B acquires company A, that's not insider trading if you already owned the stock in company A before you had any information that company B was going to make that decision.

It is, however, a conflict of interest for you to be involved in company B's acquisition of company A (e.g. influencing company B to buy company A), and might even rise to the level of a breach of your fiduciary duty to company B.

Insider trading is all about information held by "insiders", not about who owns what. So it would depend on whether you know something material and nonpublic when you liquidate your position (e.g., you know the acquisition is going terribly and the acquiring company is going to write it off).

The high-end Falcon models were an engineering marvel and, as you say, nothing else in the market was even close.

I don't know about "real estate inspection", but another use case was for them to be used in oil rigs in the North Sea to inspect the structure of the rig itself. They had to be self-stabilizing under high winds and adverse weather conditions, and they had to carry a good enough camera to take detailed photos.

Unfortunately, while the technology was there, the market wasn't. Not many wanted to get a $35K drone to be able to sustain this business.

Wow, this post is really specific. What special hardware is required on a drone for "real estate inspection"?

Don't forget tho part where the tariffs were imposed in violation of trade agreements and treaties the US had already negotiated and agreed to.

Congress delegated tariff power to the president after Smoot-Hawley caused such a disaster.

> The reason the President doesn't have this power is because the economy should not rest on the whims or understanding of any one person.

It's interesting to see that it just takes time for lessons to be un-learned. The reason Smoot-Hawley was such a disaster is that it took hundreds of people to agree that it was good policy in the house, which meant adding tariffs to the bill in favor of the districts they individually represented. The result was an egregiously long list of things being tariffed. They delegated it to the one person specifically because they weren't similarly beholden to so many conflicting pressures.

I don't mean any of this to defend Trump's actions, in fact the opposite: he's essentially managing to do the same thing even without politic pressures to do so. I just mean to say that it is reasonably sane for congress to have delegated tariffs in a limited capacity when this flaw was revealed.

I mean there are several issues at play here. He is being sued for the illegal tariffs since Republicans are spineless and are cool with him just doing anything so I'm focusing on the practical problems.

In this case it's not Trump but Peter Navarro [0] who doesn't understand how tariffs work, because he's apparently never looked into multiparty game theory.

Exhibit A: Navarro being sidelined and Scott Bessent put in charge of running tariff negotiations, after the bond markets spooked.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro

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Depends entirely how you define "growth". If you take AI, LLM as your baseline of growth, then yeah, sure. But what else is growing?

FPGAs are getting cheaper with each gen, expanding into low cost, high volume markets that were unthinkable for an FPGA 10 years ago. Lattice has an FPGA family specifically targeted to smartphones, and I've been consulting for a high end audio company that wanted to do some dsp, and a cheap FPGA was the best option in the market for the particular implementation that they wanted to do.

It's not sexy growth, but it's growth. Otherwise, we wouldn't had the explosion of the latest years in low end FPGA companies.

If FPGAs are competitive on perf/watt, why aren't they more widespread (other than crap software tooling)?

Honestly I've asked different hardware researchers this question and they all seem to give different answers.

Now compare that FPGA to Groq, SambaNova, or Cerebras. The ASICs are more efficient.

You are ignoring dividends. They have paid something like ~$9 of dividend per share since 2016.

FPGA dev is just much more painful and more expensive than software dev at every step.

That's in no small part because the industry & tools seem to be stuck decades in the past. They never had their "GCC moment". But there's also inherent complexity in working at a very low level, having to pay attention to all sorts of details all the time that can't easily be abstracted away.

There's the added constraint that FPGA code is also not portable without a lot of extra effort. You have to pick some specific FPGA you want to target, and it can be highly non-trivial to port it to a different one.

And if you do go through all that trouble, you find out that running your code on a cloud FPGAs turns out to be pretty damn expensive.

So in terms of perf per dollar invested, adding SIMD to your hot loop, or using a GPU as an accelerator may have a lower ceiling, but it's much much more bang for the buck and involves a whole lot less pain along the way.

It's hard to find places where FPGAs really win. For relatively simple tasks FPGA can beat just about anything in latency. For instance for the serialization/deserialization end of a high frequency trading system. If a problem has a large working set and needs to store data in DRAM it needs a memory controller the same way a CPU or GPU has a memory controller and this can only be efficient if the system's memory access pattern is predictable.

You can certainly pencil out FPGA or ASIC systems that which would attain high levels of efficient parallelism if there wasn't memory bandwidth or latency limits but there are. If you want to do math that GPUs are good at, you use GPUs. Historically some FPGAs have let you allocate bits in smaller slices so if you only need 6 bit math you can have 6 bit math but GPUs are muscling in on that for AI applications.

FPGAs really are good at bitwise operations used in cryptography. They beat CPUs at code cracking and bitcoin mining but in turn they get beat by ASICs. However there is some number of units (say N=10,000) where the economics of the ASIC plus the higher performance will drive you to ASIC -- for Bitcoin mining or for the NSA's codebreaking cluster. You might prototype this system on an FPGA before you get masks made for an ASIC though.

For something like the F-35 where you have N=1000 or so, could care less about costs, and might need to reconfigure it for tomorrow's threats, the FPGA looks good.

One strange low N case is that of display controllers for retrocomputers. Like it or not a display controller has one heck of a parts count to make out of discrete parts and ASIC display controllers were key to the third generation of home computers which were made with N=100,000 or so. Things like

https://www.commanderx16.com/

and are already expensive compared to the Raspberry Pi so they tend to use either a microcontroller or FPGA, the microcontroller tends to win because an ESP32 which costs a few buck is, amazingly, fast enough to drive a A/D converter at VGA rates or push enough bits for HDMI!

Most of my knowledge about FPGAs come from ex-FPGA people, so take this with a grain of salt:

First off, clock rates on an FPGA run at about a tenth that of CPUs, which means you need a 10× parallelism speedup just to break-even, which can be a pretty tall order, even for a lot of embarrassingly parallel problems.

(This one is probably a little bit garbled) My understanding is that the design of FPGAs is such that they're intrinsically worse at getting you FLOP/memory bandwidth number than other designs, which also gives you a cap on expected perf boosts.

The programming model is also famously bad. FPGAs are notorious for taking forever to compile--and the end result of waiting half an hour or more might simply be "oops, your kernel is too large." Also, to a degree, a lot of the benefits of FPGA are in being able to, say, do a 4-bit computation instead of having to waste the logic on a full 8-bits, which means your code also needs to be tailored quite heavily for an FPGA, which makes it less accessible for most programmers.

Tooling mostly. To write fast code for CPUs you need a good optimizing compiler, like clang or gcc. Imagine how much work has gone into making them good. We're talking thousands of man years over several decades. You need just as good tooling for FPGAs and it takes just as much effort to produce. Except the market is orders of magnitudes smaller. You can also not "get help" from the open source community since high-end FPGAs are way to expensive for most hackers.

Intel tried to get around this problem by having a common framework. So one compiler (based on clang) with multiple backends for their CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs. But in practice it doesn't work. The architectures are too different.

There is nothing quite like gcc or LLVM for FPGAs yet. FPGA tooling is still stuck in the world of proprietary compilers and closed software stacks. It makes the whole segment of the industry move slower and have higher friction. This is just starting to break with Yosys and related tools, which are showing wild advantages in efficiency over some of the proprietary tooling, but still only support a fraction of available chips, mostly the smaller ones.

I'm just a casual observer, but I'm pretty sure one hard thing about FPGAs is preventing abuse. A customer could easily set up a ring oscillator that burns out all the LUTs. Another thing is FPGAs are about 10x slower than dedicated logic, so CPUs/GPUs beat them for a lot of applications. Plus, there's not a lot of logic designers in the first place. Software skills don't transfer over very well. For example, a multiplier is about the size of 8kb of RAM, so lookups and complex flow are way more expensive than just multiplying a value again (kinda like GPUs, except if you only had an L1 cache without main memory).

CPU branch prediction got exponentially better. Better than most could have imagined.

I wasn't there, but I've always imagined the conversation went something like this:

Intel: Welcome, Altera. We'd like you to integrate your FPGA fabric onto our CPUs.

Altera: Sure thing, boss! Loads of our FPGAs get plugged into PCIe slots, or have hard or soft CPU cores, so we know what we're doing.

Intel: Great! Oh, by the way, we'll need the ability to run multiple FPGA 'programs' independently, at the same time.

Altera: Ummmm

Intel: The programs might belong to different users, they'll need an impenetrable security barrier between them. It needs full OS integration, so multi-user systems can let different users FPGA at the same time. Windows and Linux, naturally. And virtual machine support too, otherwise how will cloud vendors be able to use it?

Altera: Uh

Intel: We'll need run-time scaling, so large chips get fully utilised, but smaller chips still work. And it'll need to be dynamic, so a user can go from using the whole chip for one program to sharing it between two.

Intel: And of course indefinite backwards compatibility, that's the x86 promise. Don't do anything you can't support for at least 20 years.

Intel: Your toolchain must support protecting licensed IP blocks, but also be 100% acceptable to the open source community.

Intel: Also your current toolchain kinda sucks. It needs to be much easier to use. And stop charging for it.

Intel: You'll need a college outreach program. And a Coursera course. Of course students might not have our hardware, so we'll need a cloud offering of some sort, so they can actually do the exercises in the course.

Altera: I guess to start with we

Intel: Are you profitable yet? Why aren't you contributing to our bottom line?

I think they have tried to improve the software for FPGAs--FPGA backends are part of their oneAPI software stack, for example. And when I was in grad school, Intel was definitely doing courses on building for FPGAs using OpenCL (I remember seeing some of their materials, but I don't know much about them otehr than they existed).

As to why it didn't work, well, I'm not plugged into this space to have a high degree of certainty, but my best guess is "FPGAs just aren't that useful for that many things."

Size, Weight, and Power. It would be very nice if people would take the two seconds to type those words out instead of using ungoogleable acronyms on a public forum unfamilar with the terms.

Size Weight and Power.