‘Awesome Branding Move’: Intel is recycling the Altera brand for its PSG group – and it could very well have been decided at a dinner in 2023

By James On Mar 8, 2024

In an interesting branding move, Intel has rebranded its Programmable Solutions Group as ‘Altera’, re-establishing it as an independent company.

Intel’s 2015 acquisition of Altera for $16.7 billion was one of the largest deals in the technology industry at the time. Now the newly independent Altera, led by CEO Sandra Rivera and COO Shannon Poulin, is looking to expand its product range and assert its presence in the competitive field-programmable gate array (FPGA) market.

How did Intel come up with this new name? According to Serve it housePatrick Kennedy, who describes it as an ‘Awesome Branding Move’: “Last year Sandra Rivera, the new head of Altera, asked during a dinner what it should be called. I said, given the longevity of the products and the fact that a significant number of the FPGAs still say Altera, it should just be called Altera again. I’m fairly certain I had no influence on the process whatsoever, but it seems Intel followed a similar logic. Many people in the industry still call Intel’s FPGA business Altera and AMD’s FPGA business Xilinx, because both companies had positive brand values.”

Greater independence

While Intel’s merger with Altera in 2015 significantly expanded its reach, especially in the data center sector, Intel now believes Altera would do better as an independent entity.

Rivera said: “As customers face increasingly complex technology challenges and work to differentiate themselves from their competitors and accelerate time to value, we have an opportunity to reinvigorate the FPGA market.”

Altera’s FPGAs are versatile tools that can adapt to rapidly evolving standards and technologies without the need for expensive application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). They are used in a wide range of industries, from traditional areas such as communications and data centers to emerging areas such as AI.

The separation gives Altera greater independence and the company the freedom to use other foundries more often than when it was part of Intel, although it will still use Intel Foundry on a contract basis for the chip manufacturer. If Tom’s hardware According to reports, this arrangement guarantees Altera’s ability to offer its customers FPGAs produced on competitive nodes, along with supply predictability.