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Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#131

Post by SEJeff »

wmf wrote: post #128
SEJeff wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Mellanox made the HCAs (aka network cards) and Voltaire made the switches. Mellanox had their own drivers and their own MOFED (their incompatible fork of openfabrics upstream OFED with Mellanox specific enhancements).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#132

Post by [deleted] »

drewg123 wrote: post #111
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 Qua…

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#133

Post by chx »

adev_ wrote: post #15
baybal2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 who did the Ethernet RDMA protocol (RoCEv1/v2) and sell the RDMA compatible NIC that everyone use in the HPC world currently ? Tip: It is starting by Mella too.

RDMA is an interesting point because QLogic was doing some stuff then Cavium bought them then Marvell bought them. And then there's the Emulex-Avago-Broadcom chain. The entire market is converging into a few major players.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#134

Post by tntn »

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

Snapchat? (IPO valuation of 33 B)

(Not interested in playing the no true technology game, just pointing out that snapchat is the highly valued mobile app that comes to my mind)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#135

Post by Gpetrium »

matude wrote: post #126
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…

It is worth adding that the margin out of an app tends to be A LOT higher than shopping centers, airport, etc while the initial capital tends to be a fraction of it.

There are also different ways in which you can use the data to help you create another app with high daily active players. An app can have the whole world as their oyster, unlike shopping centers, etc.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#136

Post by _q1cj »

gigatexal wrote: post #65
arcaster wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that bad - intel already has an arguably strong networking department and recently purchased Altera for their FPGA tech. This is why above comments mention the benefits of nVidia purchasing Xilinx - one of the only other serious producers of cutting edge FPGA hardware - which happens to be what makes or breaks most high-throughput networking tech.

But now Nvidia is only a single HPC worthy Arm CPU away from owning all the juicy bits of a HPC: they have the GPUs, now the networking, all they need is the CPUs... vertical integration has its perks.

Yeah - I think this potential next step for nVidia has both good and bad intentions for the world of HPC. However, it'll be interesting to see how they compete with the existing "NetFPGA" open source project. They've essentially been building purpose-built offerings analogous to Intel's recently announced "Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000".

IMO, more of the issues with these advanced networking protocols is latency - something that is usually more addressable via protocol dev than just hardware. Would be very interesting to see nVidia try to acquire Xilinx and supercharge their "Aurora" low overhead transfer protocol...

sources:

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/2019-mwc-intel-announces-nex...

https://netfpga.org/

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#137

Post by chx »

cure wrote: post #40
gigatexal wrote: post #2

How bad is it that Intel didn't win?

There were only ever two major Infiniband vendors: QLogic and Mellanox. Intel already bought QLogic back in 2012. I'm not sure it would be in anyone's interest for both to be acquired by Intel, even if IB isn't very relevant anymore outside of supercomputing.

> Intel already bought QLogic back in 2012.

Cavium bought QLogic in 2016, Marvell in turn bought Cavium in 2018.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#138

Post by chx »

_q1cj wrote: post #136
gigatexal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now Nvidia is only a single HPC worthy Arm CPU away from owning all the juicy bits of a HPC: they have the GPUs, now the networking, all they need is the CPUs... vertical integration has its perks.

Yeah - I think this potential next step for nVidia has both good and bad intentions for the world of HPC. However, it'll be interesting to see how they compete with the existing "NetFPGA" open source project. They've essentially been building purpose-built offerings analogous to Intel's recently announced "Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000". IMO, more of the issues with these advanced networking protoco…

Xilinx is badly overpriced, no matter how you look at it. You could compare its P/E to similar semiconductor companies, you could compare it to all US companies, you could even look at the predicted P/E growth and it's still overpriced. Every analyst I am aware of currently advises you stay away from XLNX.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#139

Post by ghaff »

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

There were a lot of companies involved in Infiniband early on, not least of them Intel.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#140

Post by zymhan »

mruts wrote: post #37
dotancohen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm palestinian and have family in the West bank and Gaza. What you're saying isn't true at all. Funnily enough, I also have family in Jordan. Let me tell you, their lives are much better than those under Israeli occupation.

I'm in the same position. This person is off their rocker.
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