Altera Agilex 3 Launch Starting the Path of Lower-end Upgrades

Altera is announcing a big step for the company, and this time not one tied to its planned corporate spin-off from Intel. Instead, the company is announcing the new Altera Agilex 3 family as it brings Agilex to lower-cost segments of the market.

Altera Agilex 3 Launch Starting the Path of Lower-end Upgrades

The new Agilex 3 will bring the 2nd gen HyperFlex architecture to the lower-end of the segment. Altera is promising higher performance at lower power than the Cyclone V. It also has features like the dual-core Arm Cortex A55 to help with base compute capabilities.

We often see the Altera Cyclone chips in the data center. One example of that was when we reviewed the Edgecore AS7712-32X Switch you might have seen an Altera Cyclone next to the Broadcom switch chip. FPGAs are often used for various control functions from blinking status lights to fan control and more in switches.

Likewise, we have seen the Cyclone series show up in both Intel servers and even NVIDIA Grace Hopper servers as in this Gigabyte server below.

That series tends to be a go-to series when folks need a few functions, but do not need a full-blown ASIC spun for an application. Beyond the data center, these find their way into robotics, aircraft, various edge devices, and so forth. So the 15-year lifecycle is important for customers who need to deploy one design over a long period of time.

Along with this announcement, Altera is saying that the Agilex 3 FPGA is orderable today but we are going to see it a lot more as we enter 2026 just given the lifecycle of these parts.

Altera is also saying that the Agilex 5 E-series is in high-volume production and that there are new Max 10 FPGAs with high I/O density packages.

Final Words

These small FPGAs end up making there way into large numbers of systems given their cost and power footprints. Our sense is that Agilex 3 might cost more than the older Cyclone series, but that the trade-off is that one can get better power and performance and more than the cost increase. Hopefully we will start seeing these show up in STH review systems over the next year or two.