Altera brings more AI to the edge and cloud with new programmable chips

Altera, a division of Intel that makes programmable chips, unveiled today a number of products that will bring more AI to the edge and the cloud.

The products include field programmable gate array (FPGA, or chips that can be programmed after being designed into products) hardware, software, and development tools that make its programmable solutions more accessible across a broader range of use cases and markets.

At its annual developer’s conference, Altera revealed new details on its next-generation, power- and cost-optimized Agilex 3 FPGAs and announced new development kits and software support for its Agilex 5 FPGAs, said Sandra Rivera, CEO of Altera, in a press briefing.

“Working closely with our ecosystem and distribution partners, Altera remains committed to delivering FPGA-based solutions that empower innovators with leading-edge programmable technologies that are easy to design and deploy,” Rivera said. “With these key announcements, we continue to execute on our vision of shaping the future by using programmable logic to help customers unlock greater value across a broad range of use cases within the data center, aerospace and defense sectors, communications infrastructure, automotive, industrial, test, medical and embedded markets.”

Rivera has been focused on Altera for about nine months, and today the company is holding its Altera Innovator’s Day. She said the event represents the relaunching of the company under the Altera brand, largely separated from Intel.

“Our goal is to be the No. 1 FPGA provider in the world. It’s a big, audacious, ambitious goal for us. We’re the only company left in the world that is top to bottom, cloud to edge FPGAs.

“This is all we do every day, breathe, eat, sleep and drink the FPGA portfolio,” she said.

Why it matters

Altera is not a small startup. It’s got 40 years of history and was acquired by Intel in 2015 for $16.5 billion. Altera’s arch competitor is Xilinx, another FPGA firm that was acquired in 2020 by Intel’s rival AMD for $35 billion. At first, Intel wrapped Altera into its own operations. Earlier this year, Rivera began undoing that.

This meant that Altera disengaged its operations, marketing, support, product and other teams from Intel.

“From an overall product execution perspective, we made decisions early in the year to really refactor the roadmap, simplify things, lean into that waterfall strategy where we have more IP reuse, more engineering leverage for the investments, and, frankly, simplify not just our own product development, but that of our customers as well,” Rivera said. “And that’s been really well received.”

She added, “Our focus then is really entirely on how do we continue to build our pipeline and convert more of that pipeline to design wins. We feel really good about where we stand today in terms of just the design wins, and winning more than 50% of the of the opportunities that we go after. And this is how we get to number one.”

Rivera said Altera is the only independent FPGA supplier with full-stack solutions that are optimized across high-performance accelerated computing systems, next-generation communications infrastructure and intelligent edge applications.

“We are just absolutely focused on ensuring that we are delivering best in class capabilities to our customers so that they can deploy at scale, easily and cost effectively, as well as just accelerating their time to value for deploying FPGA solutions as part of their overall compute platform,” Rivera said. “There is a lot of excitement from our customers and from our ecosystem partners around that positioning and around the opportunities for us to really unlock more value and capability with a company that is solely dedicated to the FPGA industry, and that has a full portfolio of capabilities, so lots of great stuff is going on.”

The company’s comprehensive FPGA portfolio provides customers with flexible hardware that rapidly adapts to changing market requirements driven by the era of intelligent compute, she said.

Altera is targeting FPGAs for AI inference workloads with Agilex FPGAs infused with AI Tensor Blocks and the Altera FPGA AI Suite, which accelerates FPGA development for AI inference using popular frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and OpenVINO toolkit and proven FPGA development flows.

What Agilex 3 FPGAs offer

Noting the company’s introductions of its Agilex chips and pointing to the importance of AI, Rivera said, “We have the portfolio breadth, the performance, the software and, importantly, the AI capabilities that so many of our customers want on our path to No. 1.”

She noted the chips included the only product in the FPGA world with that AI infused fabric.

Altera announced today new product details for its Agilex 3 FPGAs, designed to meet the power, performance, and size requirements of embedded and intelligent edge applications. Compared to the previous generation, Agilex 3 FPGAs bring higher levels of integration, enhanced security, and higher performance in a compact package, with densities ranging from 25,000 to135,000 logic elements.

The FPGA family features an on-chip dual Cortex A55 ARM hard processor subsystem with a programmable fabric infused with AI capabilities. For intelligent edge applications, the FPGA enables real-time compute for time-sensitive applications like autonomous vehicles and industrial Internet of Things (IoT). For smart factory automation technologies like machine vision and robotics, Agilex 3 FPGAs allow for the seamless integration of sensors, drivers, actuators, and machine learning algorithms.

To meet the needs of both defense and commercial projects, Agilex 3 FPGAs add several significant security enhancements over the previous generation, including bitstream encryption, authentication, and physical anti-tamper detection. These capabilities ensure reliable and secure performance for critical applications in industrial automation and beyond.

Agilex 3 FPGAs leverage Altera’s HyperFlex architecture to provide a 1.9 times performance improvement over the previous generation. Extending the HyperFlex architecture to Agilex 3 FPGAs enables high clock frequencies in a power- and cost-optimized FPGA. Additional system performance is achieved through integrated high-speed transceivers operating up to 12.5Gbps and added support for LPDDR4 memory.

Software support for Agilex 3 FPGAs will start in Q1 2025 with development kits and production shipments expected to start in mid-2025.

Using FPGA software tools to get to market faster

Altera also announced the newest features offered in its Quartus Prime Pro software, which helps developers create and compile software faster, improving designer productivity, and accelerating time-to-market.

The upcoming Quartus Prime Pro 24.3 release unlocks more devices within the Agilex portfolio andenables improved support for embedded applications.

Customers can use this upcoming release to start designing Agilex 5 FPGA D-series, which target an even broader range of use cases compared to Agilex 5 FPGA E-series, which are optimized to deliver efficient compute in edge applications. Altera offers software support for its Agilex 5 FPGA E-series through a no-cost license in the 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 employ either an integrated hard-processor subsystem or Altera’s RISC-V solution, the Nios V soft-core processor that can be instantiated in the FPGA fabric. Customers can now access Agilex 5 FPGA design examples that showcase Nios V capabilities such as lockstep, full ECC, and branch prediction.

“We’ve got the software that we we provide to the ecosystem without charge,” Rivera said.

New OS and RTOS support for the Agilex 5 SoC FPGA-based hard processor subsystem is included in the latest releases of Linux, VxWorks, and Zephyr.

Altera and its ecosystem partners announced 11 new Agilex 5 FPGA-based development kits and system-on-modules (SoMs), joining a broad collection of Agilex 5 and Agilex 7 FPGA-based solutions available to help developers get started.

FPGA development kits give developers easy and affordable access to Altera hardware, first-hand experience of the capabilities and benefits Agilex FPGAs can deliver, and a faster path to full volume production.