Five reasons why Intel wants to buy Altera
Intel has agreed to shell out a whopping US$16.7 billion to acquire Altera, a company that makes something Intel lacks: FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips. Some of Intel's major acquisitions in the past haven't panned out well, most notably the 2010 purchase of McAfee for $7.68 billion, so only time will tell if this one will turn out better.