21–30 of 229 posts
How bad is it that Intel didn't win?
If Intel had one, they would have further consolidated their hold on the HPC/Supercomputer market. Summit is an interesting supercomputer because it's NVidia/Mellanox/IBM instead of the Intel hegemony that Cori II was, iirc the interconnect for Cori was from Cray. Now NVidia only needs to buy Xilinx...
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Israel?
Israel doesn't occupy the Gaza Strip, and we could argue about the occupation of the West Bank.
Well, except for the airspace and territorial waters, and enforcing it's security zone on the Gaza side of the Oslo Accord demarcation line.
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 surprised me if they would just have sunsetted it in favor of their own Omni-Path (which they could then develop at a leisurely pace due to lack of competition).
Though as I have mentioned before, I do wonder about the long-term prospects for Infiniband as a technology. Modern high-end ethernet does many of the same things with RDMA (RoCE), though I believe IB still has a latency advantage. And multipathing with ethernet is weird, seems both Trill and SPB are kind of dead, and most players seem to do multipathing at the L3 level (which might not be good for latency?). And in contrast to ethernet, IB is pretty much a single-player technology nowadays, so is the market big enough to bear the R&D costs to keep developing it?
> .. 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Israel?
Israel doesn't occupy the Gaza Strip, and we could argue about the occupation of the West Bank.
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...
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 to them with no borders. They all have family in Jordan and will happily tell you how much better their "occupied" life is than their Jordanian family. And yes, I've been to Jordan and I've been to Egypt and I've been to Lebanon (albeit in uniform on that one).
Dislike Israel's policies as much as you want, I'm unhappy with many of them as well. Hate our PM, you'll find good reason to. But there is no need to lie or put spin on the fact that 99% of Israelis have no qualm with Palestinians or pay them less for equal labour. Likewise, 99% of Palestinians have no qualm with Israel or Israelis, and want (like us) to work hard, come home and love our children, and live in peace with our neighbours.
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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…
That'd be a lot of money for an aquihire. Are you aware of any other aquihire's in the billion dollar range?
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…