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Intel Altera gobble is back on say money men

Grip 'n' grins expected Monday with about US$15bn of cash on the table

Intel's rumoured interest in Altera is making headlines again, with the two reportedly readying an announcement as early as Monday, US time.

The idea that Chipzilla might want to add the FPGA specialist to its collection first surfaced in March of this year, but was later hosed down.

By April, the financial wires had decided the deal was off, and that Intel would turn its attention to someone like Broadcom, which last week succumbed to the embrace of Avago Technologies.

With Broadcom off the table, Reuters and others now say the Intel/Altera deal is back on, at the original US$54 per share price discussed in March.

As The Register's sister-site The Platform noted in March, Altera's FPGA technology would give Intel an acceleration technology that would sit nicely alongside its server chips in data centres.

While GPUs are today's first choice to hardware-accelerate data centre workloads, Altera's CEO has been pushing FPGAs as a workload-specific accelerator that cuts down data centre power requirements, and Intel agrees, since it's been working on a Xeon-FPGA hybrid since 2014. Altera was a credible candidate as the secret partner in that project.

Altera already has a fabrication deal with Intel, signed back in February 2013. ®

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