This is interesting.<p>Mellanox has apparently been under activist investor pressure to reduce their R&D expenses and pay more dividends. And then there was the rumors that Intel were interested, but apparently Nvidia in the end offered more.<p>From a HPC perspective I think it's good Nvidia got the deal, Intel is already a quite dominating force in that market, and if they'd have gotten the deal it wouldn't have surprised me if they would just have sunsetted it in favor of their own Omni-Path (which they could then develop at a leisurely pace due to lack of competition).<p>Though as I have mentioned before, I do wonder about the long-term prospects for Infiniband as a technology. Modern high-end ethernet does many of the same things with RDMA (RoCE), though I believe IB still has a latency advantage. And multipathing with ethernet is weird, seems both Trill and SPB are kind of dead, and most players seem to do multipathing at the L3 level (which might not be good for latency?). And in contrast to ethernet, IB is pretty much a single-player technology nowadays, so is the market big enough to bear the R&D costs to keep developing it?
I had great respect for Mellanox when I came to know that they invented InfiniBand.<p>Again, I am suprisied it’s valued at only $6.9Bn.<p>Pardon my ignorance, but how come mobile apps and websites get valued for 10+ or 20+ Bn dollars , while someone who creates real technology is valued at only $6.9Bn
Interesting. Since Mellanox is a big player in the HPC world, this means Nvidia wants to get more serious there. Due to Nvidia's bad Linux support and pricing (compared to AMD), I know quite a number of academic computing centers which like Mellanox hardware but avoid Nvidia hardware like the plague.
I did not see that coming.<p>At NetApp we were an early customer of Mellanox (I told the founder that their name sounded like a poison gas :-)) which Steve Kleiman claimed implemnted Infiniband in anger. It was a good technology for the clustering team. Later as they grew and diversified into ethernet switches we bought a couple of their big core switches at Blekko. And at the current company we use their 40g network adapters to connect to high speed SDR hardware.<p>So now they are going to be part of Nvidia.<p>I get that this helps Nvidia in being more data center centric, but does it help them build better machine learning architectures? It does seem to be the only system that benefits from custom hardware more than the cost of that hardware. It seems that loosely coupled shared nothing clusters are not good machine learning back ends.
> .. NVIDIA’s invention of the GPU in 1999 ..<p>Well.. "almost every important company in the 3D area filed lawsuits against NVIDIA" :)<p><a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html</a>
With nVidia's poor kernel record, I hope this does not adversely affect switchdev [1]. Hopefully one day we can run the same OS on servers and switches<p>[1] <a href="http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=262&mtag=switchdev" rel="nofollow">http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=262...</a>
Mellanox are also known for their excellent support on FreeBSD. And Nvidia is not known for anything related to "Open" or "Free".<p>I just hope Nvidia would not change much to the company. For example Netflix's Open Appliance, if I remember correctly were running on FreeBSD + Mellanox 100Gb NIC. All because of their top notch FreeBSD Drivers.
As and outsider, can someone explain the "synergy" (god I hate that word) for the companies? It looks like Mellanox is primarily a network equipment company. What is the "fit" for that within a graphics/AI chip producer?
Been using second-hand, old-gen Infiniband (ransacked from eBay) for many years now, instead of the more expensive 10GigE products (both at home and client businesses). Absolutely love 'em. Their latency and simplicity rock.
Commentary on where this might be going: <a href="https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/nvidia-to-acquire-mellanox-a-potential-prelude-to-servers.23792/#post-221554" rel="nofollow">https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/nvidia-to-...</a><p>The answer: GPUoF like NVMeoF
This seems like way too much for Mellanox. I remember talking to the Nvidia guys at Supercomputing 2008 about Remote Direct Memory Acess on their cards. Huge to have their cards direct connected to the network.
So, intel took over qlogic, now fabless(!) nvidia takes over mellanox /o\. Is there some real "normal" manufacturer of fast cards like IB, 40+geth left? By normal I mean manufacturer without management doing stunt tricks and pissing off own customers (like intel and nvidia does). Please please, tell me this isn't HBA appocalypse :D (i do own 2 IB cards from "intel", guess what - it's almost completely unsupported so i just cant use them)
Interesting fact, Mellanox is an employer of Palestinian programmers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Sort of a mixed blessing, cheap labor without other options because of the occupation, but real opportunities and a more educated and well off population will be more effective at advocating for its rights:<p><a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/palestinian-high-tech-workers-plugging-shortage-of-israeli-tech-staff-1.6243852" rel="nofollow">https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/palestinian-hig...</a>