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Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#121

Post by shaklee3 »

drewg123 wrote: post #55
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 hope that it is more than an aqui-hire. Mellanox has driven IB speeds for more than a decade, limited only by PCIe bandwidth. Since they've had NICs that do both IB and Ethernet, they've been driving the ethernet market as well. We've been using their 100G adapters since 2015 (when they were first to market by a big margin). Even today, there are only a handful of vendors that can deliver a 100g NIC. I worry that i…

Infiniband hasn't increased in speed in a while, while Ethernet has. IB is all but done since Ethernet 200 and 400Gbps will be out soon, and in fact, are already supported by Mellanox switches.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#123

Post by praneshp »

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

> how come mobile apps and websites get valued

Can you name many apps and websites that closed (aka IPO or sold, not funding round) at 10+/20+ billion? Unless you're going to go for the stupid "uber is an android app my kid could could make for their senior project" shtick, I think most 10b+ apps are backed by _real_ technology

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#125

Post by dman »

bewo001 wrote: post #115
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.

I had similar hopes when Intel acquired Altera, however think Intel managed to completely botch that acquisition. I now believe Intels going through a phase where they seem to be struggling to get things out of the door on time (like 10nm, Optane, Xeon Phis, Drones, Nervana, Edison...). At a time where AMD seems to be credibly challenging Intel for the first time in over a decade, any non x86 efforts will likely end up as a side hobby and not get the attention/investment from Intel management that it deserves. As a result I am glad Mellanox did not end up at Intel.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#126

Post by matude »

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

> 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

Imagine a building, say a shopping center, airport, or a city main square, that gets the same amount of visitors per day as some of those apps, and it might start to make more sense. Take Clash of Clans for example, valued at $10 billion. It has around 100 million daily active players. One of the busiest airports, the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, has 104 million passengers annually. NY Times square receives about fifty million visitors per year.

If something, anything, gets 100 million visitors PER DAY, the value of such a real estate, even if digital, is immense.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#127

Post by intorio »

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…

At least for a commodity chip like Broadcom Tomahawk (100G), the latency is 500ns with L3 enabled, and 300ns if only L2 is enabled. Compared to the Mellanox SB7700 at 90ns ethernet has some catching up to do if latency is the end goal.

Ethernet tooling for HPC has a ways to go, but I suspect in the future it will be more competitive. Especially if specialty fabric vendors cut down on R&D.

CLOS fabric designs seem to be winning the war these days which I think favors Ethernet in the long run. Better flow distribution on aggregate links and now widespread support for MC-LAG means you can build a really wide CLOS network with L2-only.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#128

Post by wmf »

SEJeff wrote: post #109
sacheendra wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

infiniband - The high performance interconnect by Mellanox

By Voltaire, the infiniband company acquired by mellanox :) Their ethernet accelerator VMA stands for "Voltaire Messaging Accelerator".

IIRC Mellanox was always doing Infiniband; they made the hardware and Voltaire wrote the drivers (before people understood open source and created OFED).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#129

Post by finkin1 »

praneshp wrote: post #123
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

> how come mobile apps and websites get valued Can you name many apps and websites that closed (aka IPO or sold, not funding round) at 10+/20+ billion? Unless you're going to go for the stupid "uber is an android app my kid could could make for their senior project" shtick, I think most 10b+ apps are backed by _real_ technology

WhatsApp ~$22B acquisition by Facebook. LinkedIn ~$26B acquisition by Microsoft. Those are two that I can think of from memory.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#130

Post by orbifold »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #71
abaga129 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Maybe just maybe this is not the fault of Nvidia but due to the fact that large parts of the Linux ecosystem are fragile, time consuming to configure and break if you look at them in the wrong way. Professional linux distributions like Ubuntu paper over a lot of that fragility, whereas in Arch Linux you can easily burn days getting basic functionality to work (multiple sound cards come to mind) only for it to break with the next update. And yes I speak from experience, I used Arch Linux ~5 years basically for the fun of doing everything by yourself, because Ubuntu felt too restrictive and opaque.
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