Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

nvidianews.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 229 posts

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#171

Post by edoo »

mikehollinger wrote: post #9
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?

The 10g NICs are toys. ;-) Mellanox provides high speed (40/56/100/200 gigabit) switches and adapters. If you think 10g fiber is big, just wait... I’ve worked on several projects with them, and found they generally do a good job of feeding the beast when the OS and driver’s are properly tuned. I’m not informed enough to call good or bad, but will instead say it’s interesting, especially in the HPC space (and the emer…

Last I was looking you could get a 40GB card for around $300. Very impressive price that kind of speed in a home office.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#172

Post by wmf »

corndoge wrote: post #94
simula67 wrote: post #85

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 [1] http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=262...

switchdev is currently dormant. None of the silicon vendors seem to be willing to put the work in, so there's no adoption from the SDN/NOS space. We are still stuck with HALs. Also, there are multiple solutions to run Linux on switches, most notably Cumulus Linux and VyOS

switchdev doesn't look too dormant: https://github.com/mellanox/mlxsw/wiki

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#173

Post by rerx »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #162

I did not see that coming. 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 a…

State of the art deep learning models are becoming larger and larger and at some point it makes sense to distribute them over multiple GPUs because they would not fit into a single GPU's memory. At the same time training can be sped up dramatically by blowing up the mini batch size in a synchronized training regime, again requiring multiple GPUs. So the trend is towards "model parallelism" and "data parallelism" at the same time. Once you need more GPUs than you can put on a single PCI Express bus, you need a fast interconnect between servers. Infiniband seems to be the best solution at this time. Nvidia GPUs can already communicate ridiculously fast with remote GPUs via RDMA if there is an Infiniband connection. It makes a lot of sense for Nvidia to push into this direction to provide integrated solutions.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#174

Post by arcaster »

chx wrote: post #138
_q1cj wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone on the sidelines I can confirm that dev boards / most Xilinx products seem to have markedly hire price tags than comparable products from competitors...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#175

Post by kevstev »

novaRom wrote: post #19
auslander wrote: post #12

> .. NVIDIA’s invention of the GPU in 1999 .. Well.. "almost every important company in the 3D area filed lawsuits against NVIDIA" :) https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html

Thanks. Today I learned people could play 3D games (Quake2) at 25 fps at 1152x864 resolution (Nvidia TNT GPU, K6-2 300 Mhz CPU). It would be interesting to know how other computing technologies looked like 20 years ago. Is there any good place to find that online?

I would take a look at archive.org for gaming/hardware sites. Hardware sites used to be a huge thing back then, when every geek was drooling over the latest gear, whether it be CPUs, motherboards, network cards, sound cards (for real SB Live! Ftw!), gpus, etc.

Firingsquad was a big one- It was originally started by a guy who won John Carmack's ferrari in a quake tournament if I remember the story right: http://web.archive.org/web/19990101000000*/firingsquad.com

Others you may want to look at: AnandTech arstechnica tomshardware -really great coverage around intel's Rambus RDRAM debacle around 2000. sharkyextreme Aces Hardware- this site was really in depth for the time, but it updated infrequently before just stopping altogether around 2004. https://www.aceshardware.com/ Their stuff is still online.

Those were the main sites that I would check that I can remember...

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#176

Post by krembo »

scirocco wrote: post #24
krembo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel doesn't occupy the Gaza Strip, and we could argue about the occupation of the West Bank.

Not occupy but surely controls import/export into Gaza?

Gaza is held by a terrorist group, defined as such by US and other western countries. It also keeps attacking Israel with missiles. Nevertheless Israel exports medicine, food and concrete on a daily basis to help the civilians in Gaza. Do you think Israel should help them more in any way? What is a sufficient aid for an area which you're in war state with? In addition, for importing/exporting commodities, Gaza could use the their western border with Egypt, which in contrary to the Israeli border, the Egyptian is closed most of the time for the same reason - Egypt doesn't accept the terrorist regime in Gaza. Maybe you think Egypt occupies Gaza as well?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#177

Post by jabl »

intorio wrote: post #127
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…

CLOS fabric topology is the most common deployment with IB, so I'm not sure how that plays into the hands of ethernet?

But yes, seems EVPN + VXLAN is the way the industry is going nowadays to build eth CLOS fabrics, whereas Trill & SPB seem more or less dead, for some reason.

Everybody is saying ethernet is simpler to manage than IB, but IME at least for HPC the opposite is true. IB is more or less plug and play, you get RDMA, multipathing etc. all right out the box. Whereas if you'd set up an equivalent thing with ethernet, you'd have to set up DCB, RoCEv2, EVPN+VXLAN+BGP (or something equivalent).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#178

Post by jabl »

shaklee3 wrote: post #119
abcdef123xyz123 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IDK, IME IB is pretty much plug and play in an HPC setting. Plain ethernet is too, sure, but if you want to do HPC type workloads you'll have to do a lot of configuration and testing to setup DCB, RoCEv2, EVPN+VXLAN+BGP or such.

But I think this is the way the market is going in the longer term.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#179

Post by virtuallynathan »

shaklee3 wrote: post #159
intorio wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're comparing apples and oranges. Mellanox has Ethernet switches with 300ns L3 latencies -- far lower than their broadcom counterparts. So it's not an Ethernet limitation, but a broadcom limitation.

With Mellanox ethernet switches, you lose some other features in exchange for lower latency. i.e. you can only break out 16 ports to 4x25G on a 100G switch (64 25G ports).

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#180

Post by kevinlou »

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…

The digital airport comparison is such a great way of wrapping my mind around the concept of high valuations for digital commerce - it's business without the usual B&M overhead.
Post reply on HN