Intel completes $16.7 billion Altera acquisition
Intel confirmed Monday it acquired chip maker Altera in a $16.7 billion deal, the largest acquisition in Intel's history.
Originally announced in June, the deal received the green light from the European Commission in October and is now complete.
Altera will operate as a new business unit within Intel, called the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG), led by Altera's former vice president Dan McNamara.
Altera specializes in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), integrated circuits that can be reconfigured according to the user's needs after they leave the factory.
Giants such as Microsoft and Google use these chips together with Intel's Xeon line of processors to increase their performance. Following the acquisition, Intel will continue the work in that direction. It plans to combine its Xeon chips with Altera FPGA as a single package in 2016, according to The Wall Street Journal.
"We will apply Moore's Law to grow today's FPGA business, and we'll invent new products that make amazing experiences of the future possible – experiences like autonomous driving and machine learning," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in a statement.
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