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Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B
- gigatexal 8y agoHow bad is it that Intel didn't win?
- arcanus 8y agoIt is remarkable they were outbid. This acquisition has big implications for HPC in particular.
- gigatexal 8y agoYeah, Intel is just a bit over 2x the size of Nvidia, and yet they were outbid... to me this is like Apple not being willing to buy Waze and letting them go to Google. Think of what improvement it could have made on Apple maps.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wallnuss 8y agoIf 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...
- novaRom 8y agoNo way. Xilinx is way too expensive already.
- cure 8y agoThere were only ever two major Infiniband vendors: QLogic and Mellanox. Intel already bought QLogic back in 2012. I'm not sure it would be in anyone's interest for both to be acquired by Intel, even if IB isn't very relevant anymore outside of supercomputing.
- chx 8y ago> Intel already bought QLogic back in 2012. Cavium bought QLogic in 2016, Marvell in turn bought Cavium in 2018.
- greglindahl 8y agoIntel bought QLogic's Infiniband assets in 2012, not everything.
- arcaster 8y agoNot that bad - intel already has an arguably strong networking department and recently purchased Altera for their FPGA tech. This is why above comments mention the benefits of nVidia purchasing Xilinx - one of the only other serious producers of cutting edge FPGA hardware - which happens to be what makes or breaks most high-throughput networking tech.
- gigatexal 8y agoBut now Nvidia is only a single HPC worthy Arm CPU away from owning all the juicy bits of a HPC: they have the GPUs, now the networking, all they need is the CPUs... vertical integration has its perks.
- _q1cj 8y agoYeah - 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 protocols is latency - something that is usually more addressable via protocol dev than just hardware. Would be very interesting to see nVidia try to acquire Xilinx and supercharge their "Aurora" low overhead transfer protocol... sources: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/2019-mwc-intel-announces-next-generation-acceleration-card-deliver-5g/#gs.0zkxzc https://newsroom.intel.com/news/2019-mwc-intel-announces-nex... https://netfpga.org/ https://netfpga.org/
- chx 8y agoXilinx 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.
- 8y ago
- penagwin 8y agoI only know of Mellanox for their 10 gigabit ethernet cards. Does anybody know if this is a good or bad thing for Mellanox?
- baybal2 8y agoPlumpy "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.
- adev_ 8y ago> 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 who did the Ethernet RDMA protocol (RoCEv1/v2) and sell the RDMA compatible NIC that everyone use in the HPC world currently ? Tip: It is starting by Mella too.
- chx 8y agoRDMA is an interesting point because QLogic was doing some stuff then Cavium bought them then Marvell bought them. And then there's the Emulex-Avago-Broadcom chain. The entire market is converging into a few major players.
- SEJeff 8y agoAnd 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.
- jabl 8y agoI 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.
- bhouston 8y agoInteresting 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-high-tech-workers-plugging-shortage-of-israeli-tech-staff-1.6243852 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/palestinian-hig...
- dep_b 8y agoWho currently occupies the West Bank and Gaza Strip? But I think it's a good thing. People working together is one of the best ways to get a better understanding of people you would normally never meet. I've met a ton of different people through tech and it's one of the best parts about it. Meritocracy.
- reallydontask 8y agoIsrael?
- auslander 8y ago> .. 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 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html
- novaRom 8y agoThanks. 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?
- auslander 8y agoI'm reading this at the moment https://www.techspot.com/article/653-history-of-the-gpu-part-2/ https://www.techspot.com/article/653-history-of-the-gpu-part...
- rypskar 8y agoDon't know the fps, but remember the graphics where awesome after getting a Voodoo2 card in '98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive
- peter303 8y agoSGI dominatinated the 3D graphics market until NVidia upended them. SGI sold whole integrated workstations while nVidia was an addon board coprocessor. A PC plus NVidia cost much less than a SGI workstation.
- kevstev 8y agoI 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 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/ https://www.aceshardware.com/ Their stuff is still online. Those were the main sites that I would check that I can remember...
- dmitriid 8y agoWhy would a company that shells out ~7 billion dollars need advertising cookies on its website?
- frou_dh 8y agoTo give you something to bikeshed
- mruts 8y agoNvidia is in a pretty shitty situation at the moment. Stocks down almost 50% after the crypto-bubble popped (or deflated I guess is the better word).
- empath75 8y agoThat's a very short term perspective, considering they were $20 a share just a couple of years ago and are $150 a share now. Any shareholders other than people that bought in the last 18 months or so are going to be very happy with them.
- TheLoneAdmin 8y agoNVDA is worth 10x what they were 5 years ago.
- mschuster91 8y agoThe usual: to increase their worth to Google Analytics and friends.
- lallysingh 8y agoThe answer probably lies with their analytics guy's last job and the toolset they used there.
- josefresco 8y agoI see Google Analytics, and https://assets.adobedtm.com/ https://assets.adobedtm.com/ From what I read* about adobedtm.com it's not necessarily advertising. https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2402674 https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2402674
- jabl 8y agoThis 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 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?
- thisisit 8y agoA similarly interesting fact is that Starboard Value, the activist fund had tried to get Mellanox join with Marvell another company in its portfolio. But Marvell was rebuffed. Later Marvell went on to acquire Cavium for 6 billion dollars with aim to build an infrastructure company. Though from the company's latest earnings release it seems that the deal isn't really a good one.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- remind_me_again 8y agoSuch big market cap for companies we do not hear at all. Well, of course, at least me.
- abcdef123xyz123 8y agoWe 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.
- ktpsns 8y agoInteresting. 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.
- dronedronedrone 8y agomaybe they will finally opensource their gpu and cuda drivers and remove all the headaches from my life
- rhn_mk1 8y agoI too wish dreams came true...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- orbifold 8y agoMy GTX 1080 works flawlessly with Linux, as has any other NVIDIA graphics card I've ever owned (GTX 680, 480). The only time I tried an AMD card it was a complete dumpster fire, nothing worked (the open source driver at the time sucked and the proprietary driver wouldn't install properly). I bought the AMD card based on the myth that AMD has better linux support...
- abaga129 8y agoI think most user's complaint is that their drivers aren't open source and until recently were a pain to install. My 1050ti has also worked pretty much flawlessly, but I wish they would open source their drivers and make it easier on the linux developers.
- Topgamer7 8y agoTrying to get a 1070 set up w/ 2 monitors on a laptop with hybrid graphics is a nightmare. 1 display driven by intel, 1 by nvidia. Cannot get both screens working without 2 Xscreens. Xinerama wouldn't work w. proprietary drivers. Nouveau has like no support for like 1050 up. Wanted to try out SwayWM, but they don't work around how nvidia handles things in comparison to what everyone else does. Works in Ubuntu, but could not for the life of me get 2 monitors working in Arch.
- simula67 8y agoWith 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&mtag=switchdev http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=262...
- corndoge 8y agoswitchdev 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
- wmf 8y agoswitchdev doesn't look too dormant: https://github.com/mellanox/mlxsw/wiki https://github.com/mellanox/mlxsw/wiki
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kijiki 8y ago> 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 https://cumulusnetworks.com/hcl
- godelmachine 8y agoI 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
- raphaelj 8y agoMarket values profit, not produced value (i.e. revenue).
- bigtones 8y agoThat's not true - see Amazon. Public markets value and price future potential profit.
- valuearb 8y agoEssentially it's true, the market values each companies stream of future earnings out to infinity, discounted back for time to present day value. The market just has a big dissonance in how it estimates and discounts those future earnings. Amazon is seen as a future huge profit maker, while Apple is viewed as perpetually at risk of a large scale decline in it's recent profitability.
- bigtones 8y agoBecause the total addressable market for consumer mobile apps, and therefore potential dollars of revenue is much higher than for Mellanox with Infiniband - which by contrast is only the HPC market at this point.
- shawnz 8y agoWhere's the room for growth in Infiniband? Why wouldn't you just use Ethernet in future projects?
- drewg123 8y agoA lot of IB technology is based on precursors like Myrinet, Quadrics, etc. Those companies were driven from the HPC market and the top500 by Mellanox in the last 15 years. It is arguable that IB won simply because it had better marketing, and a lot more venture capitol behind it. At one point, 6 of the top 10 supercomputers in the top 500 were interconnected with Quadrics, and over 1/3 with Myrinet. However, both Quadrics and Myricom are both long gone. And neither of them sold for anything close to $6.9B
- unixhero 8y agoThe market for HPC is consolidating.
- hexo 8y agoSo, intel took over qlogic, now fabless(!) nvidia takes over mellanox /o\. Is there some real "normal" manufacturer of fast cards like IB, 40+geth left? By normal I mean manufacturer without management doing stunt tricks and pissing off own customers (like intel and nvidia does). Please please, tell me this isn't HBA appocalypse :D (i do own 2 IB cards from "intel", guess what - it's almost completely unsupported so i just cant use them)
- wmf 8y agoBroadcom? Chelsio? Marvell FastLinQ?
- ineedasername 8y agoAs 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?
- yvdriess 8y agoCommunication is a key bottleneck. Modern supercomputers budget roughly half to interconnect. Nvidia invested heavily in developing NVLINK to be able to make GPUs communicate at the bandwidth necessary to make multi-GPU boxes more practical (e.g. DGX-1). To make it scale out across multiple boxes, you need a high bandwidth, low latency interconnect, which is where IB comes in.
- chas 8y agoIf 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink)
- p1esk 8y agoNvidia sells supercomputers: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-saturnv/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-saturnv/
- crb002 8y agoThis seems like way too much for Mellanox. I remember talking to the Nvidia guys at Supercomputing 2008 about Remote Direct Memory Acess on their cards. Huge to have their cards direct connected to the network.
- rkagerer 8y agoBeen 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.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI 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 adapters to connect to high speed SDR hardware. So now they are going to be part of Nvidia. I get that this helps Nvidia in being more data center centric, but does it help them build better machine learning architectures? It does seem to be the only system that benefits from custom hardware more than the cost of that hardware. It seems that loosely coupled shared nothing clusters are not good machine learning back ends.
- nerpderp82 8y agoNvidia GPUs already support RDMA directly from GPU to Infiniband NIC, bypassing the host completely. 100G is current, 200G is in the works. For lots of GPU workloads that don't rely on lots of little kernel launches, having a completely remote GPU is not out of the question. If they want to continue building large GPU accelerated workloads, pairing more tightly with networking seems like an obvious move.
- rerx 8y agoState 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.
- gigatexal 8y agoCommentary on where this might be going: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/nvidia-to-acquire-mellanox-a-potential-prelude-to-servers.23792/#post-221554 https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/nvidia-to-... The answer: GPUoF like NVMeoF
- ksec 8y agoMellanox are also known for their excellent support on FreeBSD. And Nvidia is not known for anything related to "Open" or "Free". I just hope Nvidia would not change much to the company. For example Netflix's Open Appliance, if I remember correctly were running on FreeBSD + Mellanox 100Gb NIC. All because of their top notch FreeBSD Drivers.
- JustFinishedBSG 8y agoI can't wait for Mellanox RDMA to only work with Nvidia GPUs /s