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posted by chromas on Monday March 11 2019, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly

Nvidia to acquire Mellanox Technologies for about $7 billion in cash

Chipmaker Nvidia on Monday announced plans to acquire peer Mellanox Technologies for about $7 billion in cash.

The deal is Nvidia's biggest-ever acquisition and is expected to boost its business of making chips for data centers, allowing it to reduce its reliance on the video game industry, for which it is best known as a major technology vendor.

Financial news website Calcalist had reported earlier on Sunday that Nvidia had outbid Intel for Mellanox.

Mellanox Technologies.

Older articles at Reuters and The Register.


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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday March 11 2019, @03:38PM (5 children)

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Monday March 11 2019, @03:38PM (#812720)

    a possible route to get an ARM based supercomputer - with Nvidia acceleration of course...

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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday March 11 2019, @03:50PM (3 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 11 2019, @03:50PM (#812726) Journal

    Why do we care about the CPU architecture of supercomputers? I honestly don't know the answer to that.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Monday March 11 2019, @04:37PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Monday March 11 2019, @04:37PM (#812746)

      basically - toolchain and software.

      Having used a few supercomputers, if you want to run on *all* the resources you need to have the correct toolchain/library connect to work.

      There are *decades* of some scientific software for which the "benchmark answers" are really tightly controlled.

      ARM is low power, but Nvidia is *already* used for many computational kernels e.g. LAPACK used for LINPACK.

      Intel offers AVX-512 (important for low rep FFT operations - Nvidia is fast only when you get >Npipe), but you need to buy an *expensive* Intel.

      AMD has many threads, but no AVX-512, so cheaper but still quite hot (for 10,000 chips).

      Hence, a *low power* ARM with perhaps some FP modules and MM modules to align vectors, and then send to the GPU.

      There has been talk of this for at *least* a decade at conferences I attend - probably longer for other folks here.

      I'm just registering the fact, I do not find it that surprising , and perhaps this is a good thing ?

    • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday March 11 2019, @04:38PM (1 child)

      by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Monday March 11 2019, @04:38PM (#812747) Homepage Journal

      Two reasons, the economy and National Security. If we foolishly buy all our Peta Flops from China like the Dems want, our great cyber industry will Flop. And China will be able to send bad cyber. We're doing new I.C.B.M., new nuclear. And we need Peta Flop for that, right? Well, if we use China cyber, they can put something in there, a code that tells us, "oh look, you can make your nuclear smaller and it will still work, big money saver there." Only it won't work, because they lied. We fire our I.C.B.M., it doesn't go boom. They call that one the Fizzle. Makes a little mess but basically does NOTHING. It doesn't do nothing, it gets people angry. They're angry because "we" tried to nuke them. And possibly they nuke us back. Only, their nukes work. Because they were smart, they used American cyber. Or they made their own cyber. Not Chinese cyber. So phoney!

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday March 11 2019, @05:04PM

        by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 11 2019, @05:04PM (#812762) Journal

        I don't like this parody, but only because it's too damned easy to write like he speaks. Bush was at least a challenge to mimic the folksy idiocy of. With trump all you gotta do is start a thought, and then finish a completely different thought in a babbling staccato, and throw in his favorite keywords here and there.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @04:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @04:41PM (#812749)

    They already do IBM POWER-based supercomputers. POWER 8+ natively supports NVLink with planned support for future version in at least POWER 11.

    Interestingly if you want to buy a performant non-blob infested PC then a POWER9 Talos II is the only choice. Even the motherboard firmware and CPU microcode have their sources available in git.