In other words, the purchase allows Intel to bring a key part of the customer delivery in-house. Intel has been partnering with Altera since 2013, and the microprocessor giant expects to see the FPGA technology deployed to over one-third of all cloud service provider nodes by 2020. Today, Intel says, the CPU/chipset and FPGA elements on customer deliveries are made by separate companies but packaged together at the time of sale. By integrating these components together, it will be able to save time and money for these customers and evolve the technologies together. It expects to achieve a 2X performance improvement as a result of this integration by 2020. Intel already dominates the market for cloud-based servers. But integrating FPGA technology with its microprocessors will also enable the firm to target the IoT market, where specialty chips not based on Intel technology are currently the norm. Here, too, Intel expects to lower costs, speed time to market, and dramatically improved performance.