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Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#111

Post by drewg123 »

godelmachine wrote: post #95

I had great respect for Mellanox when I came to know that they invented InfiniBand. Again, I am suprisied it’s valued at only $6.9Bn. 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

A lot of IB technology is based on precursors like Myrinet, Quadrics, etc. Those companies were driven from the HPC market and the top500 by Mellanox in the last 15 years. It is arguable that IB won simply because it had better marketing, and a lot more venture capitol behind it.

At one point, 6 of the top 10 supercomputers in the top 500 were interconnected with Quadrics, and over 1/3 with Myrinet. However, both Quadrics and Myricom are both long gone. And neither of them sold for anything close to $6.9B

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#112

Post by SEJeff »

baybal2 wrote: post #4
penagwin wrote: post #3

I only know of Mellanox for their 10 gigabit ethernet cards. Does anybody know if this is a good or bad thing for Mellanox?

Plumpy "enterprise" customers. They still are the company to go for infiniband, but infiniband it lost much of its appeal to non true supercomputing tasks. Ethernet nowadays can do RDMA, soft guarantees on latency, in-order and reliable delivery at lower costs, and an option to reuse existing L2 networks. Mellanix has squeezed the infiniband cow dry.

And yet an ethernet frame, by design, is larger than an infiniband frame (think layer 2). When it comes down to node to node latency, given perfectly equal silicon, infiniband will still be faster.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#113

Post by bredren »

godelmachine wrote: post #95

I had great respect for Mellanox when I came to know that they invented InfiniBand. Again, I am suprisied it’s valued at only $6.9Bn. 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

"real technology" is not an objective measurement of societal value.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#114

Post by valuearb »

bigtones wrote: post #104
raphaelj wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market values profit, not produced value (i.e. revenue).

That's not true - see Amazon. Public markets value and price future potential profit.

Essentially it's true, the market values each companies stream of future earnings out to infinity, discounted back for time to present day value.

The market just has a big dissonance in how it estimates and discounts those future earnings. Amazon is seen as a future huge profit maker, while Apple is viewed as perpetually at risk of a large scale decline in it's recent profitability.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#115

Post by bewo001 »

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…

While I agree about Intel's market force, they have a much better open source software story than nvidia. Nvidia is as closed as the other big player, Broadcom.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#116

Post by linksnapzz »

bredren wrote: post #113
godelmachine wrote: post #95

I had great respect for Mellanox when I came to know that they invented InfiniBand. Again, I am suprisied it’s valued at only $6.9Bn. 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

"real technology" is not an objective measurement of societal value.

Wait another thousand years, and tell us that again.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#117

Post by 1024core »

dotancohen wrote: post #27
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...

I love the spin you put on it. Palestinian programmers make no less than Israeli programmers in the Israeli high technology sector. In fact, that goes for all jobs in the Israeli high-tech sector, from PMs to HR, CTOs. Furthermore, Palestinians in the West bank regularly talk to me about their situation, because I'm what you would call a "settler" and I buy in their towns, and I pick them up hitchhiking, and I talk t…

> because I'm what you would call a "settler"

Not just "you"; everyone. It is illegal. Even the UN has called for an end to this practice. Most countries don't recognize Israel's occupation of the West Bank. The UNSC has condemned the practice. Israel routinely destroys Palestinian homes and villages for the benefit of you people (the "settlers").

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/02/09/588118/Israel-to-c...

Read more about "settlers": https://www.btselem.org/topic/settler_violence

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#118

Post by dnautics »

orbifold wrote: post #63
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.

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...

Try doing a PCI passthrough to virtualizes that 1080 onto a VM. Then try the same thing with AMD. Sure, the AMD drivers are relatively terrible, but at least they are open source and don't kick you in the knees when you are doing something you ought to be able to do.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#119

Post by shaklee3 »

abcdef123xyz123 wrote: post #77
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.

Understand, manage, and buy networking equipment for. Infiniband is a thing of the past, especially with the Mellanox VPI adapters that support both Ethernet and Infiniband with a single bit flipped on the adapter.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#120

Post by shaklee3 »

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.

This is not a purchase for gaming -- this is for the HPC market. Nvidia drivers on Linux for HPC work really well. Academia is a tiny, tiny fraction of the market.
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