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Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#181

Post by jabl »

mikaelronstrom wrote: post #145
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…

Mellanox is big in high-end Ethernet equipment as well which is growing faster than the Infiniband business, obviously a key technology for cloud providers.

According to https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/11/02/datacenter-25g-ether... the ethernet part of the business is actually already much bigger than the IB business.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#182

Post by bsder »

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.

> Xilinx is badly overpriced, no matter how you look at it.

Is it, really?

FPGA's are now all over HPC, the 5G rollout is going to put a LOT of really expensive FPGA's in new towers, and high-end networking gear is about to get a bump due to PCI going up.

I don't know how much damage the Intel acquisition did to Altera, but if Altera has been AWOL with big customers due to the Intel acquisition, Xilinx may have a massive amount of customer wins locked in for a very long time.

I wish Xilinx would die in a hot flaming pit of Hell for many and various reasons, but they are the 500lb gorilla of FPGAs.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#184

Post by dang »

zymhan wrote: post #140
mruts wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please don't call names. That's a sure way to ignite a tinderbox, and a flamewar will do none of us any good. Scorched earth is all the same.

Even if completely wrong, the GP is pretty clearly posting in good faith (as you are too, I'm sure).

As an alternative, sharing some details of your position would be more interesting and helpful. Only if you want to, of course.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#185

Post by dang »

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…

Can you please make sure to edit out swipes, especially when posting on divisive topics? Your comment would be fine without the first bit.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#186

Post by jabl »

SEJeff wrote: post #112
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.

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.

I think the minimum size of an IB packet with no payload is 26 octets, vs. 64 octets for an eth packet. So sure, a difference of 38 octets, but at, say, 100 Gbit/s, that's less than a nanosecond difference, much much less than the IB vs. ethernet latency difference. So I think you'll have to look somewhere else for information.

I have no idea what it is, actually. Some ideas that may or may not matter (or might not even be correct):

- IB is a couple of decades younger, so could benefit from knowledge how to do fast protocols. (Not an explanation per se)

- Simpler forwarding. In IB the subnet manager gives out the LID's that are used for routing withing a subnet. They are shorter than an eth MAC (16 vs. 48 bits), so the lookups circuit in the switches can be smaller and faster(?), and also since the LID's are assigned by the subnet manager rather than being burned at the factory, they can be distributed taking into account the subnet topology, allowing switches to use LID Mask Count (LMC) filtering. Similarly, all routes within a subnet are calculated statically a priori by the subnet manager (load balancing among multiple paths is only static round robin, not dynamical load dependent), and don't have to be calculated on the fly by the switches.

- FEC rather than retransmission in case of corruption.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#187

Post by rayiner »

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

What's always blown my mind is Apple's acquisition of PA-Semi for less than $300 million. Apple is so far ahead of other phone makers in CPU performance that I would struggle to name another instance where there was such a big performance gap between competitors in the same market. I'm sure that Apple invested a lot in its chip design team since then, but the initial acquisition cost was tiny compared to the result.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#188

Post by kijiki »

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...

> Hopefully one day we can run the same OS on servers and switches.

You can do that today with Cumulus Linux, on Mellanox switches, no less. Switches from other manufacturers as well: https://cumulusnetworks.com/hcl

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#189

Post by wtallis »

rayiner wrote: post #187
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

What's always blown my mind is Apple's acquisition of PA-Semi for less than $300 million. Apple is so far ahead of other phone makers in CPU performance that I would struggle to name another instance where there was such a big performance gap between competitors in the same market. I'm sure that Apple invested a lot in its chip design team since then, but the initial acquisition cost was tiny compared to the result.

Their acquisition of Intrinsity (designers of the Apple A4 SoC) may have been even more of a steal, with estimates placing the price somewhere in the $50-150M range.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#190

Post by dkersten »

dogma1138 wrote: post #7
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?

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…

Oh. I've known about TILE64 back when Tilera created it (I spoke to their VP of something or other on the phone once, I worked in telecoms at the time and we were interested in seeing if their hardware would help accelerate something we worked on. We never went forward with it though), I hadn't realised Mellanox owned it now. Looking at wikipedia, Tilera was bought by EZChip, which was bought by Mellanox.
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