Intel has agreed to spend a whopping $16.7 billion to acquire Altera, a company that makes something Intel lacks: FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips.

Some of Intel’s major acquisitions in the past haven’t panned out well, most notably the 2010 purchase of McAfee for $7.68 billion, so only time will tell if this one will turn out better.

For now, here are five reasons behind Intel’s interest in Altera:

1. By acquiring FPGA technology, Intel is thinking outside the CPU, now that the execution of tasks is increasingly off-loaded to graphics processors and other accelerators.

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