Altera, a division of Intel specializing in programmable chips, today announced a suite of innovative products aimed at enhancing AI capabilities at the edge and in the cloud.
The newly introduced offerings include Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), software, and development tools that broaden access to programmable solutions across a variety of sectors and use cases.
At its annual developer conference, CEO Sandra Rivera shared key details about the next-generation Agilex 3 FPGAs, highlighting their power and cost optimization. She also unveiled new development kits and software support for Agilex 5 FPGAs.
“Partnering with our ecosystem and distribution allies, Altera is dedicated to delivering FPGA-based solutions that enable innovators with state-of-the-art programmable technology that is simple to design and deploy,” Rivera stated. She emphasized that these announcements reflect Altera's commitment to harnessing programmable logic, helping customers derive significant value across diverse sectors, including data centers, aerospace, defense, communications, automotive, industrial applications, testing, medical, and embedded systems.
Rivera, who has been steering Altera for nine months, emphasized that the company's relaunch under its brand marks a new chapter, distinct from Intel.
“Our goal is to become the world’s leading FPGA provider. It’s an ambitious target, but we’re the only company dedicated exclusively to FPGAs from cloud to edge,” Rivera said. “FPGA technology is our passion and expertise.”
Why This Matters
Altera is a well-established player with 40 years of industry experience, having been acquired by Intel in 2015 for $16.5 billion. In contrast, its primary competitor, Xilinx, was acquired by AMD in 2020 for $35 billion. Initially integrated into Intel, Rivera has begun to separate Altera's operations, marketing, and support teams from the parent company.
“This year, we chose to refocus our product roadmap, simplify our development process, and increase engineering leverage, which has garnered positive feedback from both our teams and our customers,” Rivera explained. “We’re successfully converting our pipeline to design wins, achieving over 50% success in our pursuits, a crucial step towards our number one objective.”
As the only independent FPGA supplier with comprehensive solutions optimized for high-performance computing, next-generation communications, and intelligent edge applications, Altera continues to prioritize delivering best-in-class capabilities that facilitate scalable, cost-effective deployment for customers.
Altera is specifically targeting AI inference workloads with its Agilex FPGAs, which feature AI Tensor Blocks and the Altera FPGA AI Suite, streamlining development with frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and the OpenVINO toolkit.
Introducing Agilex 3 FPGAs
Rivera highlighted the significance of the Agilex 3 FPGAs, designed for embedded and intelligent edge applications. Compared to their predecessors, these FPGAs offer superior integration, enhanced security, and improved performance in a compact design, ranging from 25,000 to 135,000 logic elements.
Key features include an on-chip dual Cortex A55 ARM processor with AI-infused programmable fabric, making them ideal for real-time computing in time-sensitive applications such as autonomous vehicles and industrial IoT solutions. They also facilitate the seamless integration of sensors and machine learning algorithms crucial for smart factory automation.
To address both defense and commercial demands, Agilex 3 FPGAs incorporate significant security enhancements like bitstream encryption and anti-tamper detection, ensuring reliable performance for critical applications.
Leveraging Altera’s HyperFlex architecture, the Agilex 3 FPGAs achieve 1.9 times better performance than previous versions, with integrated high-speed transceivers supporting up to 12.5 Gbps and compatibility with LPDDR4 memory.
Software support for Agilex 3 FPGAs is set to commence in Q1 2025, with development kits and production shipments anticipated for mid-2025.
Accelerating Development with FPGA Software Tools
Altera has also launched new features in its Quartus Prime Pro software, enhancing development speed and designer productivity, and shortening time-to-market. The upcoming Quartus Prime Pro 24.3 release expands device support within the Agilex portfolio and strengthens support for embedded applications.
This update will enable design work on the Agilex 5 FPGA D-series, broadening the potential application scope compared to the E-series, optimized for edge computing. Altera provides software support for the E-series through a free license in Quartus Prime Software, lowering entry barriers.
Additionally, the software now supports embedded applications with integrated hard-processor subsystems or Altera’s RISC-V solution, showcasing features like lockstep and error correction.
“We provide valuable software support to our ecosystem at no charge,” Rivera remarked.
The latest updates for Agilex 5 SoC FPGA-based processors offer support for popular operating systems, including Linux, VxWorks, and Zephyr.
Altera and its ecosystem partners announced 11 new development kits and system-on-modules (SoMs) based on Agilex 5 FPGAs, expanding resources for developers. These kits provide cost-effective access to Altera hardware, enabling firsthand experience with Agilex capabilities and facilitating a quicker path to production.
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