Just to comment on your interesting take of the Altera acquisition by Intel, I thought I would mention the scuttlebut that was going on around that time amongst the chip designers...

Most chip designers spend time developing designs on Xilinx, Altera, Microsemi, and multiple ASIC devices, so tend to have specific opinions on which one is better etc, and each designer may favor one over the other.

The FPGA vendors are embeddeding what we call "hard core" processors in FPGAs now, which is a change from most encouraging "soft core" processors before. And the trend is to embed ARM hard cores.

The rumors were that Intel was very concerned that they could not convince any of the majors to embed Intel processors, so they had no choice but to acquire one of the big ones and force the issue.

Personally I prefer the embedded ARM , but if Intel can bring the price of the Altera parts with an embedded Intel processor down, it would be enticing to switch.