Altera is back

[EEVblog]

Altera is back, but in lower case, because that's what a consultant who got paid 6 digits said is best.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-launches-altera-standalone-fpga-operation.html#gs.57s7ks



I have secretly obtained the internal company memo for the lower case logo:

altera: lowercase. limitless.
In a world of shouting voices and bold claims, altera speaks softly, but carries the future. Our name, intentionally lowercase, reflects our approach: humble, yet ambitious. We believe true innovation isn't about self-importance, but about empowering you to achieve the extraordinary.

Why lowercase?

It's approachable. We're not here to dictate, but to collaborate. We believe in the power of human connection, and an open, inviting presence is key.
It's modern. We break free from convention, embracing fresh perspectives and the ever-evolving landscape of possibility.
It's visually distinct. In a sea of uppercase logos, lowercase stands out, reflecting our unique approach and dedication to pushing boundaries.
altera is not just a name, it's a philosophy. We believe in potential, not pretense. We believe in collaboration, not competition. We believe in breaking barriers, not building walls.

Join us on this journey of lowercase revolution. Let's rewrite the rules, together.

#altera #lowercaselimitless

[xrunner]

They also knew to put "AI" into the announcement in some form or fashion - 

including the only FPGA with AI built into the fabric ...

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-launches-altera-standalone-fpga-operation.html#gs.57sclc

[SiliconWizard]

Yes, arm did the same for their logo, you need an Arial-like font in solid white and all lowercase. That's how it's done these days. And yes, it must have cost several millions of bucks just to come up with the logo, after that, just think about all  the corporate and marketing material that needs to be redone, that's probably a good full year of work and tens of millions of bucks along the way.

And kudos for the memo on lowercase, that definitely says that lowercase is more inclusive. They're breaking barriers, yes, the same breaking that everyone else is also doing. What a revolution.

[Nominal Animal]

Altera is back, but in lower case, because that's what a consultant who got paid 6 digits said is best.

The very first time I saw that, I thought it read "alter'd", just like "loserds".

[BrianHG]

Hmmmm, I don't know.  And this coming from an Altera fanboy from the beginning.
I even made a special public-domain DDR3 controller for their Cyclone/Max/Aria FPGA series designed to bypass the limitations of their paid version during my ultra-bad luck triple long covid.  here  here
I'm thinking its time to look at Xilinx.

[SiliconWizard]

Hmmmm, I don't know.  And this coming from an Altera fanboy from the beginning.
I even made a special public-domain DDR3 controller for their Cyclone/Max/Aria FPGA series designed to bypass the limitations of their paid version during my ultra-bad luck triple long covid.  here  here
I'm thinking its time to look at Xilinx.

Lattice is nice too. They've launched quite a few new chips which look pretty promising. (I also like their lower-end FPGAs, but that's for different use cases. They have pretty powerful stuff now too.)

[EEVblog]

They also knew to put "AI" into the announcement in some form or fashion - 

It's also secretely in the logo on the end.

[SiliconWizard]

Altera is back, but in lower case, because that's what a consultant who got paid 6 digits said is best.

The very first time I saw that, I thought it read "alter'd", just like "loserds".

Well, yeah, this cut-off 'a' with the square dot and the two shades of blue, that's what has taken genius designers. The lower case Arial stuff is blander, yet this is what they are very proud of, apparently.
Let them break more barriers!

[BrianHG]

Hmmmm, I don't know.  And this coming from an Altera fanboy from the beginning.
I even made a special public-domain DDR3 controller for their Cyclone/Max/Aria FPGA series designed to bypass the limitations of their paid version during my ultra-bad luck triple long covid.  here  here
I'm thinking its time to look at Xilinx.

Lattice is nice too. They've launched quite a few new chips which look pretty promising. (I also like their lower-end FPGAs, but that's for different use cases. They have pretty powerful stuff now too.)

Lattice has some nice cheaper large FPGA in the 40kgate and 80kgate range, and their IDE looks nice.  But, that is where it ends with that stupid inability to parameterize their key functions like their PLL in code because its settings needs to be an actual  // comment // with some special stars within.  I just couldn't believe it when I found out.  Altera has a similar issue when assigning strings in parameters, but at least I could find a dirty workaround making a fake integer array with quoted strings within.

[xrunner]

They also knew to put "AI" into the announcement in some form or fashion - 

It's also secretely in the logo on the end.

Oh yea! 

[glenenglish]

Altera is way behind. (except at the top top top end)

They've got some catching up to do.    O.M.G. Cyclone 5 yawn. and Cyclone 5 SoC yawn yawn. documentation and support for the SoC  ++YAWN.
But they have catchup and getting ahead in their road map, so in 2 year's time, their offerings low and mid tier will again be market leaders until the next leapfrog.....see how they go with the doco.

glen
(Xilinx Alliance Partner)

[glenenglish]

Efinix is worth a look though, I have bought a couple of trays. while a XIlinx man, the lack of supply forced me to look elsewhere.
Some useful packages also.  Pricing is OK. It's not rock bottom at all. roughly competetive with Xilinx for same job done if you are on XIlinx step pricing.
Tools are OK. small company - easy to get their attention if you have a problem. I've had a couple of things fixed.

Lattice is good in the smaller sized stuff, and good for high volume work. cheap.

I feel that Xilinx and Altera are better for lower volumes <1000, < 10,000 where tool and development form a large slab of the costs, the documentation and tools are better so time and money  are saved because of that.   

[pcprogrammer]

I'm thinking its time to look at Xilinx.

You mean AMD or is it amd now.

Maybe in time they will go back and become xilinx. 

Edit: Or xailinx after they have payed some whizz PR person.

[glenenglish]

apart from some annoying branding, they've left the xilinx website  mostly alone

Efinix is interesting. the Titanium fabric will run at 1000 MHz without cracking a sweat, LUTs, BRAMS, DSPS. but their interconnect is a bit different and impacts  routing delays  , so you need alot of register stages to have things big and fast.

[radiolistener]

They also knew to put "AI" into the announcement in some form or fashion - 

including the only FPGA with AI built into the fabric ...

Does "AI" means Altera Intel or "An Intel"? 

[Nominal Animal]

"Meta-Alphabet: Always Near You.  Watching and Listening.  You are our Precious Resource, our Investment.  Make Us Proud."

Any bets on when Microsoft will rebrand itself as "ms."?

Have any companies stated their preferred pronouns yet?

[suudy]

"Meta-Alphabet: Always Near You.  Watching and Listening.  You are our Precious Resource, our Investment.  Make Us Proud."

https://youtu.be/56hqrlQxMMI?si=5kPKDCPDCvgeuis9

[langwadt]

Yes, arm did the same for their logo, you need an Arial-like font in solid white and all lowercase. That's how it's done these days. And yes, it must have cost several millions of bucks just to come up with the logo, after that, just think about all  the corporate and marketing material that needs to be redone, that's probably a good full year of work and tens of millions of bucks along the way.

And kudos for the memo on lowercase, that definitely says that lowercase is more inclusive. They're breaking barriers, yes, the same breaking that everyone else is also doing. What a revolution.

almost as rebellious as getting a tattoo

[Nominal Animal]

🎶 I am a pie in the sky 🎵
🎵 I am a baker of ro-o-oo-olls 🎶
🎶 I can cheat you bland 🎵
🎵 I can breed your mind 🎶

Nice song!  But now I'm hungry.

[ejeffrey]

Six figures for a rebrand seems low. A handful of Agilex 7 SoCs would cost around as much.

Extremely low.  It's not the "coming up with the idea" that costs the money, it's everything else.  Also, note that intel has used the lower case i in their logo since the 60s.  My guess would be that using lowercase 'a' in the logo was declared by fiat from Intel to keep the association with Intel who will remain the majority owner.  Maybe they debated it and spent a lot of money on consultants to tell them it as an OK idea, but, I think it's plenty likely that particular decision cost nothing.

The cost of the (re-)branding is developing several logo options within the requested theme, doing searches for legal issues or confusions with similar logos globally.  Making sure the name or logo doesn't have negative or profane associations in other languages.  Preparing several variants of the logo art, updating web pages and documentation, building slide deck templates for employees to use when they give presentations, developing artwork for use in advertising and marketing, legally registering the trademarks in all relevant jurisdictions, acquiring domain names, and so on.  I'm relatively skeptical of the value of rebranding when the company structure isn't changing, but in this case they kind of had to do something, and most of the costs were not coming up with the logo.

By re-using the name Altera it probably cost a lot less on at least the legal side than a new name, but I would still guess closer to 10M dollars than 0.1 M.  Still chump change compared to the $16B intel spent acquiring Altera less than 10 years ago, and probably less than the other reoganization costs of the spinoff, and less than the $4B Intel's stock fluctuates by on a daily basis (it's up 2% today on a ~$200B market cap)

[Nominal Animal]

The coke-sniffing design consultants must've been really peeved to find out that aItera.com was already in use.

[Bud]

AI built in the fabric - does this statement makes sense to you guys?

[Bud]

But it is much more buzzwordy, isnt it.

[ejeffrey]

AI built in the fabric - does this statement makes sense to you guys?

Wherever you see "AI" just replace it with "low precision vector dot products".  In other words, it's something that FPGA manufacturers have been doing for 25 years -- distributed memory with lots of low precision multiply / accumulate cores.  I guess "in the fabric" means "more of what we already do" rather than dedicated vector coprocessors.  It also probably means "tensor flow and OpenCL -> RTL compilers" to let software and machine learning people use them without learning Verilog or how to use the frankly gross state of traditional FPGA development tools.

I continue to be skeptical, GPUs are always going to be better at dot products than FPGAs, and these days even CPUs are going to give FPGAs a run for their money.  Also, everybody already has GPUs and CPUs.  It only makes sense if for some reason you need the FPGA programmability and you need to do a lot of vector math on the same chip.  It makes more sense in the networking space: FPGAs continue to be unmatched for high throughput interconnects.  If you for some reason need to do streaming ML classification on multiple 100 gigabit networking flows, an FPGA makes a lot of sense. 

[tszaboo]

They also knew to put "AI" into the announcement in some form or fashion - 

It's also secretely in the logo on the end.

The name should be ailtera. That will be 500K USD please for consulting.