Today, Intel has announced that it has acquired Omnitek, an England-based company that develops solutions for video and AI.
Currently, the details about the deal haven’t been released yet. Though according to TechCrunch, the price is not material to Intel. Intel will be taking on Omnitek’s 40 employees along with the rest of Omnitek’s business, including 220 FPGA IP cores and related software for accelerated video and AI processing.
A logical move for Intel
Intel has been investing a lot of effort into the design and production of FPGA chips. The company wants to keep up with the complexity and power demands of today’s computers. It makes sense for Intel to purchase Omnitek. With Omnitel’s work in video, the acquisition should help Intel continue to grow.
“Omnitek’s technology is a great complement to our FPGA business,” said Dan McNamara, senior VP, GM, Programmable Solutions Group at Intel, in a statement. “Their deep, system-level FPGA expertise and high performance video and vision related technology have made them a trusted partner for many of our most important customers. Together, we will deliver leading FPGA solutions for video, vision, and AI inferencing applications on Intel FPGAs and speed time-to-market for our existing customers while winning new ones.”
Omnitek has primarily worked on video and broadcasting in the past. However, they’ve recently worked on AI inferencing and its required computing for the applications that use AI.
More business
According to Intel, the market for silicon is now valued at $300 billion annually. There’s also programmable solutions accounting for $8 billion right now. However that number is projected to grow with “many of Intel’s cloud service providers, enterprise and embedded customers.” All of them use FPGAs in video and visual-related applications. The deal will give Intel more of that business.
Image courtesy sdxcentral.com
