Intel's Acquisition Of Small Chip Maker Easic Programmable Chip Reoptimization

NetEase news July 13th, according to Reuters, Intel announced on Thursday that it plans to buy a small chip maker eASIC, which will help further promote its diversification and expand beyond the CPU chip.

Intel does not disclose specific terms with eASIC, which is located at the Santa Clara in California, California, where the Intel headquarters is located. A spokesman for Intel said the purchase price was "not important", but about 120 people would join Intel's group of programmable solutions.

In 2015, Intel spent $1 billion 670 million to acquire chipmaker Altera and set up a programmable Solution Group on this basis. This is one of Intel's measures to expand its revenue base, because in recent years, the PC market and CPU chip market of its main source of income have declined.

Altera is focused on on-the-spot programmable chips, which aims to solve one of the oldest problems in the computer field - to make computing tasks balanced by embedding these computing tasks directly into custom chips in software carrying common chips (such as Intel's CPU).

The custom chip is more efficient, but its development cost is high, and the custom chip can't perform any other tasks well except for the original purpose. Altera's field programmable aims to find an intermediate zone: they allow customers to reconnect the different parts of the chip through reprogramming after buying a custom chip, so that they can accomplish new tasks and have some of the advantages of the custom chip.

After acquiring eASIC, Intel also got another option. If a client has a favorite way to use a Intel programmable chip, the program can be "frozen" in a chip in a factory, which is closer to a fully customized chip, but it does not produce too much extra cost.

"It's not programming in the field but programming in a factory," Dan McNamara (Dan McNamara), the head of Intel's programmable solutions department, said in an interview with Reuters. It still costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you can finish it in four months, rather than two years. "

Mcnamara said that although Intel has designed all existing programmable chip products, the most advanced chip models are produced by its own factories, and the low end products are produced by TSMC. He said chips from eASIC are currently produced by TSMC and GlobalFoundries, but Intel has yet to decide whether or not it will start producing eASIC chips.

Mcnamara said: "we will further study and find out the development direction of the next generation of chips." (Liu Chun)

(original title: Intel acquires small chipmaker to bolster efforts beyond CPUs)

(editor in responsibility: Wang Fengzhi _NT2541)