Intel announced last year paid $16.7 billion for the world's largest Altera FPGA company, and the company or Intel one of the few wafer foundry partners. Although Intel with deep pockets, but a $16.7 billion purchase price in the semiconductor industry is still staggering in the deal. So the question comes, the Intel spent so much money with your Altera, exactly for the sake of what? Recent analytical behind the article is worth reading, which Intel acquired Altera unexpectedly like Microsoft's factors, the Wintel alliance was unbreakable, same feeling stronger now!

The Wired published stories to explain the story of Microsoft on the FPGA chip to develop and utilize, content is also very long, mainly said Microsoft engineers DougBurger with CEO Steve ballmer in 2012 put forward a new plan to Catapult (themselves), he recognized the near future, as the world's top Internet giant Microsoft run Web services will be more and more complicated, so they need a new system architecture to solve these problems, to know though is considered to be a software giant Microsoft, but spend more than $4 billion a year on the purchase of hardware, is definitely a big business.

Microsoft's answer was eventually FPGA programmable gate control chip, for decades, the advent of this product is different from the general CPU processor, FPGA is programmable, higher flexibility, though cannot be compared to CPU generality, but in terms of specific performance advantage, and the efficiency is very high, you can simply understand it for things such as the GPU computing chips, when computing the latter better than the CPU can be too much, but your computer can't use GPU instead of CPU.

The end result is that Microsoft began to widespread application of FPGA chip to support new business, Bing search with the help of it, the blog of Microsoft and the Azure cloud services also want to use the FPGA chip. On the other hand, it also bring many benefits to Microsoft, reduce the cost of 30%, a 10% reduction in power consumption, speed is fast.

The FPGA chip is becoming increasingly popular, Intel also noticed this trend naturally, especially in the data center business, so the Intel Altera at a huge sum of money to buy their own customers, and prepared to Altera FPGA chip integration to the Xeon processor.

As for Intel to good gay friend Microsoft's acquisition of FPGA, Wired mentioned that Microsoft is indeed the original Intel one of the reasons for the acquisition of Altera, but will not be the only reason, because Intel FPGA chip, the future will also be open to third party vendors.