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Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#152
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I questioned the validity of polls in Israel, if you noticed. Can expand on that: the population is very fragmented and you can manipulate the poll by the way that a question is framed for instance, by the selection of persons polled, lots if variables that also tend to be abused in one way or another. They can't even get the exit polls right, seriously!

How about the the elections, local and state, and how the politicians talk to get support. People are honest when they vote. Maybe moderate people support bigoted politicians for some reason and politicians think that bigotry gets votes, I don't know. But it surely don't look good.

Moderate people did support extreme politicians. They accomplished the task by using good old fear tactics (which are especially effective, when actual rockets are flying at major cities and people get stabbed in the streets by people pronounching their will to destroy Israel) Now, we also have a very fragmented parlament which allowed some small parties (the ultra orthodocs) to be a linchpin for coalition building. They aligned themselves with the right, because they got the funds they wanted. (The last moderate leader with a chance of being PM, Tzipi Livni, refused paying them, while Netanyahu didn't. Since then, Netanyahu crippled the Free press with a multi thronged attack. Aided by astronomical sums of money from Sheldon Adleson, created a free daily paper, which he directly controls. He focused his efforts as the minister of communications (he is actually not only the PM but the minister in a few other offices) to destroy a TV channel that was home to some very critical journalists. He managed to fragment the media to a huge amount of small players, reliant on government advertising(all in the name of making the media more democratic and free). After a very successful reform in the public broadcasting channel, done by Gilad Arden, one of his deputees, he learned that the reform didn't give him editorial power, He lamented that the reform was a mistake and tried to shutdown the public broadcasting authority. He is still working on it, he pulled his weight so no extra budget will be given to host the Eurovision competition, which we won last year (yay!) So now the channel either exceeds it's fixed budget, and he can 'prove' that public broadcasting is inefficient. Or the channel won't host the competition, which will make all Israelis hate the public broadcasting authority.... WinWin. Oh another example of him corrupting the israeli media was shown in the recent criminal inditment he is facing. Aledgedly he gave very preferential treatment for a Telco company in exchange for editorial control in a news website owned by the same owner of that Telco...

Using all of these new media channels under his absolute or partial control he galvanised the populus against the treacherous left, and perpetuated a very strong siege mentality (which us Jews are, understandably, prone to) while positioning himself as the only viable leader capable of fending off all those who wish to destroy Israel (which is easy, because there are plenty of people actually seeking that end) The last few years he really upped his game by talking directly to the public through Facebook and WhatsApp, (because the media is apparently against him ️...) And using much more crude language, a la Trump. This new media operation is managed by his son. He and his far right allies also orchestrate a public campaign against the so called left junta in the high court. This is done via his affiliated media, and by bringing about blatantly populist non 'constitutional' laws that the court rejects, which he can use as proof for the 'leftist' court. (We don't have a formal constitution, but we have something similar)

Similarly He also promotes the idea that a leftist junta is controlling the media, the police (after his appointed chief of police didn't curtail investigations against him) and all public beaurocrats. Oh and his son is posting antisemitic memes depicting Soros copied from the American alt right. So yeah, the israeli PM is using classic antisemetic tactics against the israeli left. (We live in weird times... :( )

But, The employment rates are high, TV is entertaining and the economy is stable, so most people can easily buy in the only Netanyahu can lead us.

So if you'd ask me a few years ago, I'd say people of Israel are moderate, but fearful for the lives. Since then, the constant hammering of propoganda is corroding some basic democratic values. Younger people are less moderate, and paradoxaly are more prone to the siege mentality (although Israel is stronger than ever military wise) and nationalistic chauvinism. So I don't know if the future is bright. We still have a vocal oposition, and a moderate (albeit leaderless) majority, so I hope when he leaves the scene we'll manage to come back to some sane discourse, but I won't bet on it.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#153
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.

I had the opposite experience.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#154

As and outsider, can someone explain the "synergy" (god I hate that word) for the companies? It looks like Mellanox is primarily a network equipment company. What is the "fit" for that within a graphics/AI chip producer?

If you want to run a computation on more than one of those AI (and scientific linear algebra) chips, you need some network to connect them. The higher the bandwidth and the lower the latency of that network, the less likely the network performance limits total system performance. See NVLink as an example of Nvidia’s related work. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#155
Been using second-hand, old-gen Infiniband (ransacked from eBay) for many years now, instead of the more expensive 10GigE products (both at home and client businesses). Absolutely love 'em. Their latency and simplicity rock.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ah, I see. Not only do you have to have made solid technology, it should not be delivered through an app or website. I didn't realize those were the goalposts.

(https://engineering.linkedin.com/open-source as as starting point)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#157
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

sorry, I should have moved the end of my comment ("are backed by _real_ technology") to the end of my first statement.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#158
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.

Modern HPC is being done with the Nvidia toolkits.

Sure, the Nvidia driver is closed-source and a pain to work with for OS developers, but for the use-cases it's designed for (CUDA etc), it's far and away the best-in-class on Linux.

To my knowledge, there are no systems in the TOP500 running AMD chips or GPUs. Intel has some competition in the CPU space (POWER series, some ARM, etc) but if GPUs are in those systems, they're Nvidia.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#159
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…

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.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

#160
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…

Intel already have the high-performance interconnect they acquired from Cray (Aries) and now sell as "OmniPath". Not sure how that sells head-to-head vs. InfiniBand though. IB obviously has a lot more legacy presence in HPC data centers.

Edit: sorry somehow glossed over your mention of OmniPath, didn't mean to restate what you already said.

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