Intel to put its brand on Stratix 10, ship by the end of the year
Krzanich believes cloud and connected devices to be the future of Intel
Fresh off of Intel's acquisition of Altera, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich on Thursday said that Intel plans to put its brand on the Stratix 10 FPGA processor, making it the first of Intel's 14nm silicon technologies.
Internet of Things
"It's going better than expected, and we're confident we're going to ship to customers by the end of this year," Krzanich said at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
Noting that the Stratix 10 delivers up to 10 teraflops of single precision floating point performance, he added, "This thing is a beast."
Krzanich stressed that FPGAs will be central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem as workloads like machine learning and packet management become more important. "Putting the software down onto the silicon and using the FPGA as an accelerator of these workloads is critical," he said.
The CEO also addressed the "four concerns" he hears about regarding the Altera acquisition. First, he said that Intel is "absolutely committed" to the FPGA business and plans to grow the business within Altera at an even faster rate than it's currently growing. He also stressed that Intel can support long product life cycles.
Next, Krzanich promised that customers' level of service will not change, noting that Altera will remain a separate business group, with separate sales and support. At the same time, he said Altera will be able to "leverage all the assets of Intel" and is benefiting from a "good cross-pollination of engineers and technologists."
Lastly, he said he is taking a "very pragmatic" approach to products built on ARM cores. "I'm about providing customers what they need," he said. "I can commit to you... any product built on an ARM core will continue as long as that ARM core is what's required to win the business and build the product."