Intel last year acquired FPGA-maker Altera for $16.7 billion in cash, the chipmaker’s largest purchase in history. As it turns out, Microsoft played a key role in Intel’s decision to make the purchase.
A recent feature from Wired explains how, in late 2012, engineers within Microsoft attempted to sell then-CEO Steve Ballmer on an idea called Project Catapult. Doug Burger explained that in the near future, the world’s top Internet giants would be running web-based services so complex that they’d require a whole new architecture to run them.
