Why Intel 16.7 billion acquisition of FPGA companies? Turned out to be good friends of the Microsoft-Intel, Microsoft-IT information

Last year, Intel announced a $ 16.7 billion acquisition of the world's largest Althera FPGA company, and the company is Intel a handful of Foundry partners. Although Intel backers, but purchase price of us $ 16.7 billion acquisition in the semiconductor industry is still staggering. So here's the thing, Intel won Altera spent so much money, how, and for what? Recently resolved behind the scenes article worth reading, which refers to the Intel acquisition of Altera had Microsoft's--Wintel Union when the unbreakable, now also love better than gold!

United States Wired website published paper explained has Microsoft on FPGA chip again utilization of story, content also is long, main is said Microsoft engineers Doug Burger and at of CEO Ballmer in 2012 proposed has a new plans--Catapult (voted stone), he think soon of future, as world top Internet giant of Microsoft run of Web service will increasingly complex, so they need new of system schema to solution these problem-- You know Microsoft is thought to be the software giant, but spent more than $ 4 billion a year buying hardware, is definitely a big deal.

Microsoft eventually to out of answers is FPGA can programming door control chip, this products came out has for decades years has, and CPU this General processor different, FPGA is can programming of, flexibility more high, although cannot with CPU than versatility, but in specific performance Shang has advantage, and energy efficiency very high--everyone can simple put it understanding for similar GPU calculation chip this things, do graphics operation of when which than CPU can strong too more has, but you of computer impossible only with GPU and without CPU.

End result is that Microsoft began large scale FPGA chip to support new business, Bing search with its Microsoft Office 365 and Azure cloud service FPGA chips are also used. The other hand, it also brings many benefits to Microsoft, reduces the cost of 30%, 10% less power, run 1 time faster times.

FPGA chips are becoming more popular, Intel also noticed this trend, particularly in the data center business so heavily at Intel acquired its own customers of Altera, and prepare the Altera FPGA chips into their Xeon processors.

As for Intel to good friend Microsoft FPGA companies, original Wired did mention one of the reasons Microsoft is Intel buying Altera, but will not be the only reason because the FPGA chip Intel will in the future open to third party vendors.

Intel为何167亿收购FPGA公司？原来是为了好基友微软 - Intel,微软 - IT资讯

去年Intel宣布斥资167亿美元收购了全球第一大FPGA公司Althera，而且这家公司还是Intel为数不多的晶圆代工合作伙伴。虽然Intel财大气粗，不过167亿美元的收购价在半导体行业收购案中依然是令人咋舌的。那么问题来了，Intel花了这么多钱把Altera拿下了，到底是为了什么？最近有篇解析幕后的文章值得一读，其中提到Intel收购Altera竟然有微软的因素——Wintel联盟当年牢不可破，现在同样情比金坚啊！

美国Wired网站刊文解释了微软对FPGA芯片重新开发利用的故事，内容也很长，主要是说微软工程师Doug Burger与当时的CEO鲍尔默在2012年提出了一个新计划——Catapult（投石机），他认为不久的将来，作为世界顶级互联网巨头的微软运行的Web服务会越来越复杂，因此他们需要全新的系统架构来解决这些问题——要知道微软虽然被认为是软件巨头，但每年在购买硬件上的花费超过40亿美元，绝对是一笔大买卖了。

微软最终给出的答案是FPGA可编程门控芯片，这种产品问世已经数十年了，与CPU这种通用处理器不同，FPGA是可编程的，灵活性更高，虽然不能跟CPU比通用性，但在特定性能上有优势，而且能效非常高——大家可以简单把它理解为类似GPU计算芯片这种东西，做图形运算的时候后者比CPU可强太多了，但你的电脑不可能只用GPU而不用CPU。

最终的结果就是微软开始大面积应用FPGA芯片支撑新业务，Bing搜索用到了它，微软的Office 365及Azure云服务也要用到FPGA芯片。另一方面，它也给微软带来很多收益，减少了30%的成本，减少了10%的功耗，运行速度则快了一倍。

FPGA芯片越来越受欢迎，Intel自然也注意到了这个趋势，特别是在数据中心业务上，所以Intel不惜巨资收购了自己的客户Altera，并准备把Altera的FPGA芯片集成到自家的Xeon处理器中。

至于说Intel为了好基友微软收购FPGA公司，Wired原文确实提到微软是Intel收购Altera的原因之一，但不会是唯一原因，因为Intel的FPGA芯片未来也会对第三方厂商开放。