Re: Not Surprising
At the time of the buyout Altera had gone to Intel for fabrication of their next gen devices (Stratix 10).
However Stratix 10 has a lot of far-reaching design changes from previous generations & was severely delayed (reminds one of AMD's state back then).
But due to the size and promised speed of Stratix 10 (1 GHz!) it looked very promising for data centre applications, and prior to the buyout Intel and Altera had already been doing work on Xeon-FPGA integration.
I _think_ that's why the buyout occurred.
You make an interesting point about TSMC - but Xilinx is still the no 1 FPGA vendor and they make a lot of money per device. On the whole I think it's about fleshing out the portfolio, especially now that Rome is allowing AMD to take a serious crack at the data centre market.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
