Coming far quicker than we suggested late yesterday, Intel Corp. has acquired Altera Corp. at an increased valuation than previously suggested, of $16.7 billion.

The news comes after a period where the two agreed to negotiate an acquisition, but couldn’t agree, until today, on a price.

According to The Wall Street Journal the price valued Altera shares at $54 a pop, but before Altera’s not so great first quarter results.

Founded in 1983, Altera has from it beginning manufactured Programmable Logic Devices, (PLD’s), an electronic component used to build reconfigurable digital circuits that are different from Intel’s range of CPUs.

The company’s portfolio aims to address a variety of system-level challenges that includes performance, power consumption, total cost of ownership, board area, time-to-market and design team productivity.

Altera’s product range has a wide scope, and their PLD’s are used  in industries including automotive, broadcast, computer and storage, consumer, industrial, medical, military, test and measurement, wireless and wireline.

Game on

The buy not only increases Intel’s coverage of the broader market, but takes a good fight up to the now-combined Avago Technologies Ltd. combo company given their acquisition of Broadcom Corp. last week.

When we covered that acquisition we headlined it as it being a challenge to Intel, and now Intel has fought back with its own expanded lineup.

In the redux of 1999 it may be startups and non-pure enterprise players that are primarily being acquired, but there’s a serious war here when it comes to chips and Intel is putting up a decent fight.

It’s somewhat odd that Intel had to negotiate so long to acquire Altera; recalcitrance from a takeover target isn’t unknown, but there’s no doubt that with Altera on board and expanding Intel’s range that it strengthens the company particularly at a juncture in the overall space which is spreading in all sorts of different directions: not just mobile, but Internet of Things (IoT) as well, an emergent space where there’s not quite one agreed on standard yet, and there’s still a chance, much like Intel had in the 80’s, to become the leader, and the leading standard in the coming years once the dust is settled as many enter the space, but few, not unlike the computer chips of the 80’s, will survive the distance.

Image creidt: pestoverde/Flickr/CC by 2.0