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The Case for IBM Buying Nvidia, Mellanox, and Xilinx
- jps359 10y agoseeing as IBM just sold their chip fab to globalfoundries, this seems unlikely.
- jjm 10y agoIf IBM tried to do this I can see other players stepping up to outbid them. Didn't IBM divest much of these business lines and focus on services?
- AJ007 10y agoIBM is in the process of selling off its assets and returning capital to its executives and shareholders. The service thing is probably smoke and mirrors to prevent a run on the stock.
- broodbucket 10y agoThey divested their x86 systems business (thinkpads & servers) but still have a power servers division.
- timClicks 10y agoI am sure that a move like this would make perfect sense for IBM, but it would hollow out great parts of the HPC vendor ecosystem. That ecosystem is already quite fragile with the ascendency of Intel x86 chips everywhere
- itomato 10y agoIt may create a little cavity in the 10G and FC HBA market, but a unified product vision spanning the three is dizzying by comparison, and hardly a reason not to. It's easy for me to imagine how SoCs with the best of each could be a catapult for HPC.
- beambot 10y agoIBM market cap:$170B Nvidia market cap: $65B That's a tall order...
- taspeotis 10y agoPeople try the weirdest things... take a look at "Something lighter." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-30/immigration-orders-and-odd-tenders https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-30/immigrati...
- owenversteeg 10y agoOh man, I knew that'd Matt Levine. The only email newsletter I subscribe to - and I hate email newsletters. That entire page is worth reading, for anyone with a few extra minutes.
- faragon 10y agoIt would be easier for Intel to buy Nvidia...
- scottlegrand2 10y agoI'd rather see Intel buy rights to AMD's upcoming Vega GPUs and kill off the entire Xeon Phi line as the pointless misadventure it has been so far.
- mbilker 10y agoI thought the Xeon Phi line is better now that it is all one processor instead of a separate coprocessor. I saw a few weeks ago here on HN on an actual use case for its MCDRAM and spreading the load over its separate clusters of cores.
- Athas 10y agoThe problem isn't the fact that it's a coprocessor, I think. NVIDIA GPUs are all coprocessors, and they are wildly successful.
- selimthegrim 10y agoCould you point me in its direction?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cjensen 10y agoA horrifying proposal based on the assumption that servers and network are the end-all and be-all of everything. "Commodification" is a thing, and Xilinx fits everywhere, not just in places destined to have no profit. In fact, their best markets are the new ones with no pre-existing specialized chips available to replace FPGAs.
- ktta 10y agoCan you please explain what you were referring to by 'new ones with no pre-existing specialized chips available to replace FPGAs.'? I've never really head of any thing new that can replace FPGAs.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- leoedin 10y agoOnce a market for a particular chip is big enough, it's much more cost effective to replace an FPGA with an ASIC (a custom silicon chip). The non-recurring cost to have an ASIC developed is often millions of dollars, so it only makes sense in high volume applications. FPGAs excel in low volume, and in products that are still being developed.
- krona 10y agoPlease, no. I work with both IBM and Nvidia and I can say such an acquisition would be a cultural mismatch that would make Daimler/Chrysler look like a boardroom tea party. IBM is hollowed out and tries to cover that up with headline-making acquisitions and effective marketing. It's aimless and sclerotic, trying to pursue growth markets but is largely incapable of making good products; constantly over-promising and under-delivering. NVidia has it's best days ahead of it. I think the direction it's going with ARM has more legs than what they're doing with POWER. They make innovative products that work, and have fantastic partnerships across the industry. Perhaps more importantly, the target markets of these two companies are diverging, not converging. IBM is desperately trying to move up the value chain, away from hardware, to remain competitive. You could hardly say the same about Nvidia in how it's pursuing the automotive industry.
- phkahler 10y ago>> NVidia has it's best days ahead of it. I think the direction it's going with ARM has more legs than what they're doing with POWER. I'm thinking NVidia doesn't really like ARM, they are putting a RISC-V core on future GPUs after all.
- baobrien 10y agoI think the RISC-V cores they're putting on their chips are more for management than as application processors. If they didn't use RISC-V there, it'd probably run one of their own ISAs rather than ARM.
- phkahler 10y agoIt is for management, but it is also replacing the one they had with their own ISA. One of the slides also indicated a desire for "Rich OS support" - see the third slide: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_RISCV_Story_V2.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_... I keep thinking their future may eventually be Tegra with Risc-V replacing ARM.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoYou only need to see what IBM did to SoftLayer to foresee what would happen to Nvidia.
- throwawayggg001 10y agoThey are doing the same to the Weather Company.
- Spooky23 10y agoIt might be good, as the ensuing obliteration of value might wake people up to the dark side of the era of cheap debt and crazy financial engineering that runs today's world.
- lend000 10y agoOn top of the other problems mentioned by commenters: Intel and Altera are an arguably better fit (Intel had already worked with Altera closely as their foundry) and despite the clear strategic alignment of FPGA's and high performance servers, it seems they are struggling to bear fruit.
- orionblastar 10y agoYeah, but IBM doesn't have a good track record of buying out companies and making them profitable. Anyone remember when IBM bought out Lotus? Anyone remember when IBM was making OS/2 with Microsoft? IBM got out of the PC desktop, laptop, and printer markets. They got out of the Intel server markets as well. IBM should just provide service for Linux and make their own FOSS apps for Linux that they can sell support for. Maybe invest or submit code to ReactOS, HaukOS, AROS, or OSFree? The least that IBM can do is document every OS/2 API call so someone can write an FOSS alternative to it, or a WINE like environment for Linux.
- tomc1985 10y agoEw, no. IBM would likely kill Geforce, which is the whole reason all y'all are talking about everything but that right now... Long before Titan or Pascal or any of this built-for-ML stuff, a high-end PCIe gaming card (or quadro/firegl, which were built for sci/eng visualization) was the only way to dabble in OpenCL et al.
- frik 10y agoIBM should instead buy Intel and Microsoft, that would at least be funny.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- seesomesense 10y agoIBM acqui-kills firms and products. It is the great Sargasso sea of IT.
- douche 10y agoWe have one good GPU manufacturer and you want to destroy it by having it swallowed up by the shambling corpse of Big Blue? No, just no.
- Zigurd 10y agoPlease stop thinking of IBM as a vertically integrated technology company. They are a service company, with a veneer of technology and intellectual property. These kinds of hypotheticals should be formulated the other way around, specifically: "What if IBM sold off the Power architecture and IPO'ed it big enough to go acquire a sustainable hardware technology stack?" Power will eventually wither within IBM due to the impedance mismatch in R&D investment.
- crb002 10y agoXilinx makes sense. Let Xilinx operate on it's own as long as they deliver a FPGA+Mainframe system for BlueMix, and a FPGA supercomputer for Dept of Energy.