The move stems from Andy Grove's book, which emphasizes focusing on the core business to achieve significant wins. Altera had not been a primary focus for Intel, and the company now needs to improve its balance sheet.

Raghib Hussain, former President at Marvell Technology and former CEO of Cavium will succeed Sandra Rivera as CEO of Altera, effective May 5, 2025.

The plan for moving Altera to Intel manufacturing and integrating its portfolio with the Data Center was a limited success. The acquisitions happened at a time when Intel struggled with moving down from 14 nm to 10nm. The manufacturing problem seems to be behind Intel with Intel 18A already in risk production. 

The integration of AMD and Xilinx has, thus far, yielded marginal success at best. Although AMD gained capabilities in NPUs, an automotive strategy, aerospace and defense, adaptive computing, and FPGAs, the acquisition has arguably failed to significantly move the profit needle. Large acquisitions are historically hard. 

AMD completed its acquisition of Xilinx on February 14, 2022, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $49 billion. This was the largest chip deal in history at the time.

One can only wonder if Mobileye might be next?