Intel’s chief executive pledged to support of the former Altera’s base business including use of ARM cores and long product lead times at the first event of the merged x86 and FPGA makers. In a Q&A session he also provided some insights on the company’s acceleration strategy in light of its recent acquisition of startup Nervana.

“More than 50% of value if the [$16 billion Altera] acquisition was actually tied to growing Altera at a faster rate than it was growing,” said Brian Krzanich in the first ISDF event here.

As an example, Krzanich pledged to ship before the end of the year Altera’s flagship, the Stratix 10 FPGAs. It will wear the Intel brand and use both Intel’s 14nm process technology and be the first chip to use its embedded multi-die interconnect packaging technology.

Kraznich promised “no changes in existing or planned products” using ARM cores.

“There is no plan to yank ARM out [of FPGAs] and stick in [Intel architecture (IA)] and make you all change your programming models,” he told an audience of several hundred FPGA developers. “There are some advanced products that may like an IA core but my guess is the majority of them won’t -- that would be wasted money on our part and trouble for our customers,” he said,

“The default processor [to embed in FPGAs] will be ARM -- I want to make sure we kill any of that question or debate,” Krzainch said. “There will be some level of performance at the high end with Xeon and FPGAs – we’re shipping a co-packaged product today and we will talk about generating many more of these -- and we think there will be a class of performance at the upper end of the data center that will need these capabilities,” he said

In response to a question, Krzanich reaffirmed Intel is working on products that will combine Xeon server processors, FPGAs and 3D XPoint memories on Intel Omnipath fabrics. However he declined to give any details on such chips or when they will ship.

A year ago when the Altera deal was announced, “customers had a wait-and-see attitude and a concern we would be a data-center play,” said Dan McNamara, a former Altera executive who now manages Intel’s FPGA division. Today “customers see the investments, road maps and improvements, and I feel we’ve mitigated a lot of the concern,” he said.

By: DocMemory
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