Intel flogs off majority stake in Altera to private equity for $4B

A decade after gobbling up Altera, Intel is loosening its grip. On Monday, the x86 giant said it's flogging a 51 percent stake in the FPGA slinger to private equity firm Silver Lake.

The deal, which values Altera at $8.75 billion, is expected to bring in $4.46 billion in cash when it closes in the second half of this year. While by no means a small chunk of change, it's nowhere near the $16.7 billion Intel paid for Altera, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) designer, back in 2015.

In a statement on Monday, Intel boasted that the deal will establish Altera as the "largest pure-play FPGA" vendor in the world — though that's only because its much larger rival Xilinx happens to be owned by AMD these days.

FPGA are deployed in all sorts of things, from telecoms equipment and financial trading systems, to ...