Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#71

Post by Topgamer7 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

abaga129 wrote: post #68

orbifold wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My GTX 1080 works flawlessly with Linux, as has any other NVIDIA graphics card I've ever owned (GTX 680, 480). The only time I tried an AMD card it was a complete dumpster fire, nothing worked (the open source driver at the time sucked and the proprietary driver wouldn't install properly). I bought the AMD card based on the myth that AMD has better linux support...

I think most user's complaint is that their drivers aren't open source and until recently were a pain to install. My 1050ti has also worked pretty much flawlessly, but I wish they would open source their drivers and make it easier on the linux developers.

Trying to get a 1070 set up w/ 2 monitors on a laptop with hybrid graphics is a nightmare. 1 display driven by intel, 1 by nvidia. Cannot get both screens working without 2 Xscreens. Xinerama wouldn't work w. proprietary drivers. Nouveau has like no support for like 1050 up.

Wanted to try out SwayWM, but they don't work around how nvidia handles things in comparison to what everyone else does.

Works in Ubuntu, but could not for the life of me get 2 monitors working in Arch.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#72

Post by dogma1138 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #31

dogma1138 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One out of only 2 vendors for InfiniBand which is quite important for HPC especially in the Top 500. They also have some sort of a parallel VLIW CPU architecture that they've been trying to get off the ground for a while now called TILE/TILE64 so that might also play into things. However since NVIDIA opened their offices in Israel a while ago they might simply be looking for an acquihire since Mellanox is a fabless s…

I think Mellanox is moving away from the Tilera architecture in favor of re-using the mesh interconnect with ARM cores, as in their BlueField chip.

Could be, but their mesh fabric might be useful for some multi-GPU configurations especially if NVIDIA goes into chiplets, I don't know if it's better than NVLINK or not but since NVLINK looks to be pretty much PCIe with a lot of the overhead stripped out of it it just might be.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#73

Post by bayindirh » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

ktpsns wrote: post #58

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.

nVidia's Tesla cards work relatively painless in HPC environments. When you install a supporting driver and set the cards' persistence mode to your needs, the rest is generally automagic.

However, they're hot and need serious juice to run, so you cannot just shove 36 of them to a rack and just power them on.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#74

Post by Cyph0n » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

fxfan wrote: post #45

Cyph0n wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Israeli children aren’t? Both sides use outrageous claims to fuel the fire, so to speak.

how on earth can you compare children toting guns and shouting `death to israel` with whatever the israeli kids are taught? (I doubt they are even told about Palestinians, tbh)

> I doubt they are even told about Palestinians, tbh

Assuming this were true, how exactly is it a good thing?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#75

Post by amitport » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #8

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: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/palestinian-hig...

Updated(!) interesting fact, Nvidia is an employer of Isreali and Palestinian programmers that are getting paid much less than their American counterparts. Cheap labor without other options because of their less competitive job market, but real opportunities and a more educated and well off population will be more effective at advocating for its rights

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#76

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #69

jabl wrote: post #23

This is interesting. 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. 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 surpris…

A similarly interesting fact is that Starboard Value, the activist fund had tried to get Mellanox join with Marvell another company in its portfolio. But Marvell was rebuffed. Later Marvell went on to acquire Cavium for 6 billion dollars with aim to build an infrastructure company. Though from the company's latest earnings release it seems that the deal isn't really a good one.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#77

Post by abcdef123xyz123 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

jabl wrote: post #23

This is interesting. 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. 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 surpris…

We have been moving away from IB for our platform (algorithmic trading) since Ethernet now has almost comparable latency and is a lot easier to understand and manage.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#78

Post by lallysingh » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #16

Why would a company that shells out ~7 billion dollars need advertising cookies on its website?

The answer probably lies with their analytics guy's last job and the toolset they used there.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#79

Post by tome » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #8

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: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/palestinian-hig...

ITT: A standard denial of service attack against discussion of any Israeli company.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#80

Post by jandrese » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

opencl wrote: post #60

dogma1138 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One out of only 2 vendors for InfiniBand which is quite important for HPC especially in the Top 500. They also have some sort of a parallel VLIW CPU architecture that they've been trying to get off the ground for a while now called TILE/TILE64 so that might also play into things. However since NVIDIA opened their offices in Israel a while ago they might simply be looking for an acquihire since Mellanox is a fabless s…

The last new TILE architecture chip shipped over 5 years ago and Linux dropped support for the architecture completely last year.

TILE64 got squeezed at both ends, with GPUs becoming more capable on one side and CPUs getting lots of cores (Threadripper) on the other. The niche just closed up on them.