Intel Spins Off FPGA Biz With Sandra Rivera At The Helm

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Sandra Rivera is off as executive veep of Intel's Datacenter and AI group, and will instead be CEO of the x86 giant's now-soon-to-be-spun-off FPGA business.

On a call with investors late Tuesday, Intel boss Pat Gelsinger discussed the chipmaker's decision to hive off its Platform Solutions Group (PSG), arguing the move ought to provide the unit the autonomy it needs to compete more aggressively in the FPGA market.

"We haven't been managing it as well as we could have," Gelsinger said of PSG on the call. "We also see that we have the opportunity to execute more effectively in the lower margin, mid and low-end areas of the business."

For those who don't recall, Intel bought its way into the FPGA market in 2015 with the $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera. Since then we've seen a flurry of FPGAs from Intel for a variety of applications, particularly as of late. So far this year, the Xeon processor goliath has rolled out 11 products, including an update to its Agilex programmable array portfolio that we took a look at last month.

And also for those who don't know, FPGAs - or Field Programmable Gate Arrays - are chips packed with circuitry that can be configured as needed to perform specific tasks at relatively high speed in hardware. You can program FPGAs to handle stuff like glue logic, peripheral control, data processing on the line, and many more things. They are quite useful in solving application-specific problems, especially when they ship with accelerators and CPU cores already on the die.

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