Altera, a division of Intel that makes programmable chips, today unveiled a series of products that may bring more AI to the sting and the cloud.
Products include field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs, or chips that could be programmed after they’re integrated into products), hardware, software and development tools that make the corporate's programmable solutions more accessible to a wider range of use cases and markets.
At its annual developer conference, Altera revealed recent details about its next-generation power- and cost-optimized Agilex 3 FPGAs and announced recent development kits and software support for its Agilex 5 FPGAs, Altera CEO Sandra Rivera said in a press conference.
“Working closely with our ecosystem and channel partners, Altera stays committed to delivering FPGA-based solutions that empower innovators with cutting-edge programmable technologies which can be easy to develop and deploy,” said Rivera. “With these vital announcements, we proceed our vision to shape the longer term through the use of programmable logic to assist customers realize greater value across a broad range of use cases in the info center, aerospace and defense, communications infrastructure, automotive, industrial, test, medical and embedded markets.”
Rivera has been focused on Altera for about nine months, and today the corporate is hosting its Altera Innovator's Day. She said the event represents the corporate's relaunch under the Altera brand, largely separate from Intel.
“Our goal is to grow to be the world's leading FPGA provider. This is a giant, daring and bold goal for us. We are the one company on the earth that provides FPGAs from end to finish, from the cloud to the sting.
“This is all we do each day: breathe, eat, sleep and drink the FPGA portfolio,” she said.
Why it can be crucial
Altera will not be a small startup. It has a 40-year history and was acquired by Intel in 2015 for $16.5 billion. Altera's biggest competitor is Xilinx, one other FPGA company that was acquired by Intel's rival AMD in 2020 for $35 billion. Initially, Intel folded Altera into its own business units. Earlier this 12 months, Rivera began reversing that.
This meant that Altera decoupled its operations, marketing, support, product and other teams from Intel.
“From a product execution perspective, we decided earlier this 12 months to fundamentally rework the roadmap, simplify things, lean into the waterfall strategy where we’ve more IP reuse, more engineering leverage for the investments and, frankly, simplify not only our own product development but in addition that of our customers,” Rivera said. “And that's been rather well received.”
She added: “Our focus then really is all about how we will proceed to grow our pipeline and convert more of it into design wins. We feel really good about where we’re today when it comes to design wins alone, and we've won greater than 50% of the opportunities we're pursuing. And that's how we grow to be primary.”
Rivera said Altera is the one independent FPGA vendor with full-stack solutions optimized for high-performance accelerated computing systems, next-generation communications infrastructure and intelligent edge applications.
“We're completely focused on providing our customers with best-in-class capabilities in order that they can easily and cost-effectively deploy them at scale. We also wish to speed up their time to value for deploying FPGA solutions as a part of their overall computing platform,” said Rivera. “Our customers and our ecosystem partners are really enthusiastic about this positioning and the opportunities for us to actually unlock more value and capability with an organization that's dedicated exclusively to the FPGA industry and has a full capabilities portfolio, so there's plenty of great things happening there.”
The company's comprehensive FPGA portfolio offers customers flexible hardware that may quickly adapt to changing market demands within the age of intelligent computers, she said.
Altera targets FPGAs for AI inference workloads with Agilex FPGAs equipped with AI Tensor Blocks and the Altera FPGA AI Suite, which accelerates FPGA development for AI inference using common frameworks comparable to TensorFlow, PyTorch and OpenVINO toolkit, in addition to proven FPGA development workflows.
What Agilex 3 FPGAs offer
Rivera pointed to the launch of the corporate's Agilex chips and the importance of artificial intelligence, saying, “We have the breadth of our portfolio, the performance, the software and, most significantly, the AI capabilities that so a lot of our customers want as we move toward becoming No. 1.”
She identified that the chips are the one product within the FPGA world with this AI-infused structure.
Altera today announced recent product details for its Agilex 3 FPGAs designed to fulfill the ability, performance and size requirements of embedded and intelligent edge applications. Compared to the previous generation, Agilex 3 FPGAs offer a better level of integration, improved security and better performance in a compact package with densities starting from 25,000 to 135,000 logic elements.
The FPGA family features an integrated dual Cortex-A55 ARM hard processor subsystem with a programmable fabric equipped with AI capabilities. For intelligent edge applications, the FPGA enables real-time computations for time-critical applications comparable to autonomous vehicles and the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT). For smart factory automation technologies comparable to machine vision and robotics, Agilex 3 FPGAs enable seamless integration of sensors, drivers, actuators and machine learning algorithms.
To meet the needs of each defense and industrial projects, Agilex 3 FPGAs offer several key security enhancements over the previous generation, including bitstream encryption, authentication, and physical tamper detection. These features ensure reliable and secure performance for critical applications in industrial automation and beyond.
Agilex 3 FPGAs leverage Altera's HyperFlex architecture, providing a 1.9x performance improvement over the previous generation. Extending the HyperFlex architecture to Agilex 3 FPGAs enables high clock frequencies in an influence and value optimized FPGA. Additional system performance is achieved through integrated high-speed transceivers as much as 12.5 Gbit/s and extra support for LPDDR4 memory.
Software support for Agilex 3 FPGAs will begin in the primary quarter of 2025. Development kits and production shipments are expected to start in mid-2025.
Get to market faster with FPGA software tools
Altera also announced the newest features of its Quartus Prime Pro software, which helps developers construct and compile software faster, improve designer productivity and reduce time to market.
The upcoming version Quartus Prime Pro 24.3 unlocks additional devices throughout the Agilex portfolio and
enables improved support for embedded applications.
Customers can use this upcoming release to start development of the Agilex 5 FPGA D-Series, which targets an excellent broader range of applications in comparison with the Agilex 5 FPGA E-Series, which is optimized for efficient computing in edge applications. Altera offers software support for its Agilex 5 FPGA E-Series via a free license in Quartus Prime software, helping to lower the barriers to entry for Altera's mid-range FPGA family.
This software release also includes support for embedded applications that use either an integrated hard processor subsystem or Altera's RISC-V solution, the Nios V softcore processor, which could be instantiated within the FPGA fabric. Customers can now access Agilex 5 FPGA design examples that display Nios V features comparable to lockstep, full ECC, and branch prediction.
“We have the software that we offer to the ecosystem without spending a dime,” Rivera said.
New OS and RTOS support for the Agilex 5 SoC FPGA-based hard processor subsystem is included in the newest versions of Linux, VxWorks and Zephyr.
Altera and its ecosystem partners announced 11 recent Agilex 5 FPGA-based development kits and system-on-modules (SoMs), complementing a broad collection of Agilex 5 and Agilex 7 FPGA-based solutions that help developers start.
FPGA development kits provide developers with easy and cost-effective access to Altera hardware, the chance to experience first-hand the features and advantages of Agilex FPGAs, and a faster path to volume production.
