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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.
Older articles at Reuters and The Register.
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Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox Technologies for $7 Billion
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The smallest worm will turn being trodden on.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Monday March 11 2019, @04:37PM
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 ?