
Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B - vostok4
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-mellanox-for-6-9-billion
======
jabl
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 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?

~~~
abcdef123xyz123
We 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.

~~~
godelmachine
May I ask what’s IB?

~~~
sacheendra
infiniband - The high performance interconnect by Mellanox

~~~
patrickg_zill
Infiniband is actually a standard and Mellanox became the go to supplier.
However in the early stages there were many more suppliers.

~~~
baruch
Intel bought one of the IB players and for all I know killed it.

~~~
jabl
Intel bought Qlogic, made some proprietary enhancements to their IB tech,
which they now sell under the omni-path brand.

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godelmachine
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

~~~
matude
> 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

Imagine a building, say a shopping center, airport, or a city main square,
that gets the same amount of visitors per day as some of those apps, and it
might start to make more sense. Take Clash of Clans for example, valued at $10
billion. It has around 100 million daily active players. One of the busiest
airports, the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, has 104
million passengers annually. NY Times square receives about fifty million
visitors per year.

If something, anything, gets 100 million visitors PER DAY, the value of such a
real estate, even if digital, is immense.

~~~
Gpetrium
It is worth adding that the margin out of an app tends to be A LOT higher than
shopping centers, airport, etc while the initial capital tends to be a
fraction of it.

There are also different ways in which you can use the data to help you create
another app with high daily active players. An app can have the whole world as
their oyster, unlike shopping centers, etc.

~~~
throwaway5752
It's worth adding, too, that the airport and building take much larger capital
expenditures to build and are far less reproducible as a result... and will
probably have decades or centuries of future revenue. For a given game, that's
probably a few years of peak popularity and comparatively easy to replicate by
competitors.

To the point of this article, it's kind of surprising to me at least that
licensing companies like ARM and Qualcomm have been so much more successful
than Mellanox.

~~~
angry_octet
A facility like an airport has a monopoly position, geographically and due to
regulation, and the capital cost of competition, and as you say will likely be
earning for many decades. ARM also has a long term monopoly, think of the
sheer weight of code for ARM devices. It takes huge capital to produce a new
from scratch CPU arch, esp due to patent problems (which makes RISC V all the
more amazing), and deep pockets to start producing chips at scale, build a
developer ecosystem etc. Games titles can produce a lot of cash for low CAPEX,
but I don't think we'll be hearing about Fortnite in 5 years, let alone 50.

In contrast, Mellanox produces a niche product. It is critical to HPC and some
deep pocketed finance people, but it is never going to be at the volume of
e.g. ethernet.

The long term aspect is that, as Moore's law scaling becomes harder and
harder, distributed computation becomes more essential. Right now we are in a
dip in peak compute rate requirements, because we have invented battery
powered computers and 4G, and hence cloud. But the work done in the cloud
isn't very taxing, mainly single threaded. But I'm confident we'll soon be
seeing a lot heavier parallel computation in the cloud soon, and stuff that
won't fit into one or four GPUs. The tradeoffs between PCIe and IB after 4*16x
start to favour IB, especially if the IB silicon is on the NVLink switch
complex. So from the perspective of integration bringing much greater IB
volume, the acquisition multiples the worth of MLNX by an order of magnitude
-- if nVidia can execute.

------
ktpsns
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.

~~~
orbifold
My 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...

~~~
mackal
Ahh what are you talking about? That "myth" didn't exist until the open source
drivers really started working.

Biggest issue with AMD on Linux right now is that they sometimes seem to
forget to fully enable support in patches before release. Like the RX 590 had
to have firmware updates post release because they forgot to do everything I
guess.

nVidia GPUs were always recommended over AMD because their support was
significantly better before the mainoine Radeon/Radeon si/amdgpu drivers
really started being great. nVidia will still run better now, but the benefit
of the open source driver ecosystem out weighs that for me.

~~~
pjmlp
I am still waiting that benefit to provide the missing OpenGL and hardware
video acceleration features that were never ported from fxglr.

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ChuckMcM
I 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.

~~~
rerx
State 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.

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auslander
> .. 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
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?

~~~
rypskar
Don'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)

------
penagwin
I only know of Mellanox for their 10 gigabit ethernet cards. Does anybody know
if this is a good or bad thing for Mellanox?

~~~
dogma1138
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 semi chip maker
it kinda fits that also.

~~~
opencl
The last new TILE architecture chip shipped over 5 years ago and Linux dropped
support for the architecture completely last year.

~~~
jandrese
TILE64 got squeezed at both ends, with GPUs becoming more capable on one side
and CPUs getting lots of cores (Threadripper) on the other. The niche just
closed up on them.

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simula67
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...](http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=262&mtag=switchdev)

~~~
corndoge
switchdev 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
switchdev doesn't look too dormant:
[https://github.com/mellanox/mlxsw/wiki](https://github.com/mellanox/mlxsw/wiki)

------
ksec
Mellanox 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.

------
ineedasername
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?

~~~
yvdriess
Communication 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.

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rkagerer
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.

------
gigatexal
Commentary on where this might be going:
[https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/nvidia-
to-...](https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/nvidia-to-acquire-
mellanox-a-potential-prelude-to-servers.23792/#post-221554)

The answer: GPUoF like NVMeoF

------
crb002
This 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.

------
hexo
So, 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
Broadcom? Chelsio? Marvell FastLinQ?

------
gigatexal
How bad is it that Intel didn't win?

~~~
cure
There 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.

~~~
greglindahl
Intel bought QLogic's Infiniband assets in 2012, not everything.

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unixhero
The market for HPC is consolidating.

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JustFinishedBSG
I can't wait for Mellanox RDMA to only work with Nvidia GPUs /s

------
bhouston
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...](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/palestinian-high-tech-
workers-plugging-shortage-of-israeli-tech-staff-1.6243852)

~~~
dotancohen
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 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.

~~~
fxfan
That and the fact that while Israel is blamed for everything, nobody ever
mentions how Palestinian children are poisoned with anti-israel rhetoric.

~~~
Cyph0n
And Israeli children aren’t? Both sides use outrageous claims to fuel the
fire, so to speak.

~~~
fxfan
how on earth can you compare children toting guns and shouting `death to
israel` with whatever the israeli kids are taught? (I doubt they are even told
about Palestinians, tbh)

~~~
Cyph0n
> I doubt they are even told about Palestinians, tbh

Assuming this were true, how exactly is it a good thing?

~~~
jvzr
I don't think parent claimed it was a good thing, more like "yeah Israeli
children are not taught to shout death chants at Palestinians, in fact I'd
venture they are not even taught about Palestinians". Not better, not worse,
just a different stroke of bad.

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dmitriid
Why would a company that shells out ~7 _billion_ dollars need advertising
cookies on its website?

~~~
mruts
Nvidia 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
That'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.

