NVIDIA indeed to Acquire Mellanox Technology for $6.9 Billion
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Kaarme
I bet at least a hundred million went to those big name financial and legal advisors mentioned at the end of the article.
Anyway, I'm glad Nvidia got it, not Intel, if indeed the company's fate was to be bought.
schmidtbag
Why? To me, this seems like really bad news - I smell a monopoly coming. Intel needs everything they can get to be competitive, and Nvidia is already dominating the server GPU market. Nvidia could've bought Mellanox years ago so for them to do this now was really just to spite Intel, and leave AMD in the dust while they're at it (there are AMD systems involving Mellanox hardware).
__hollywood|meo
considering team greens questionable business practices as of late, i cant say im sorry to see them bogged down with a massive capital obligation like this.
Denial
I can hardly fault Nvidia for not wanting the only other infiniband company to be gobbled by Intel.
The rest of the industry seems to be moving behind Gen-Z Interconnect anyway. This will temporarily hurt AMD/Xilinx but I don't see it as a long term issue.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12431/genz-interconnect-core-specification-10-published
SniperX
Because Intel already acquired QLogic IB technology....for that reason, I'm glad there is still another player in the market (Nvidia), although Oracle developed their own IB interconnects, not sure if they sell to third parties.
Noisiv
Not-a-monopoly:
The acquisition will unite two of the world’s leading companies in high performance computing (HPC). Together, NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker.
Aekold
From what I've read, it's actually the opposite. Intel has been heavily present in the InfiniBand market since their purchase of QLogic's IP in 2012. They are major manufacturers of InfiniBand host bus adapters and network switches. Mellanox was their biggest competitor. Intel also has its hand in Ethernet and Omni-Path. For these reasons, many speculated that regulators would have stepped in if Intel had won the bid.
Nvidia, on the other hand, has partnered with Mellanox in the past and relies on their networks, but has never had a presence in the InfiniBand market itself. While this acquisition rounds out their server/data center portfolio quite nicely (maybe too nicely), they don't run the same risk of being viewed as a monopoly as Intel. The purchase was done simply to provide them with a financial fallback, should their GPU business take a hit (as it did recently).
EDIT: Looks like others beat me to it while I was writing this. 🙂
cowie
how bad could they be doing with 7b cash laying around.
they have a lot going on already besides gpu's that is only 30% of their cash flow
Astyanax
companies like this can also make use of their own equity to take over another entity.
schmidtbag
I agree; I totally understand why Nvidia is doing this, I just don't like what this means.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. So basically Intel was trying to eliminate all IB alternatives from the market?
So... how are you thinking this won't be a monopoly? Both Mellanox and Nvidia have a huge presence in major servers. Combine the two and all of that success goes toward 1 company; a company known for proprietary products. That's not good news as far as I'm concerned.
Noisiv
@schmidtbag
They are combining the numbers: Nvidia + Mellanox = over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers.
That's big, but not monopoly big.
schmidtbag
Not yet it isn't, but it's not hard to predict where things could go from there. For example, Nvidia could suddenly cut off the Mellanox sales for AMD-based systems. That means for AMD users, if they don't have another IB to go to, that means the customers might jump to Nvidia. Nvidia already supports OpenCL and other compute standards, so it's not like devs would have to re-write everything. By partnering with Mellanox, Nvidia could also supply more attractive pricing.
Noisiv
why would nvidia kill their own sales?
Nvidia + AMD have already been married in Top500 systems
schmidtbag
You aren't looking at the broad picture. They can do with Mellanox what they did with Ageia's PhysX. PhysX used to be something anyone could hardware accelerate, regardless of platform. Although nothing prevents you from running PhysX now, the hardware-accelerated aspect became an exclusive feature to Nvidia. At the time Ageia was acquired, many people (myself included) deliberately bought Nvidia for the extra benefit. Sure, there were ways to install both AMD and Nvidia drivers, but that was a pain to deal with. I would be shocked if Nvidia doesn't plan to do something similar with Mellanox's stuff.
So they aren't going to kill their sales, they're probably going to increase them, hence me being worried, since they already have too much power in the server market.
HardwareCaps
Well Mellanox actually is not a bad buy. It's a profitable and pretty big company, I just hope Mellanox will continue to to provide datacenters solutions regardless.
JamesSneed
If your stomach hurts try some Mellanox, now in a new green mint flavor.
mbk1969
So many gurus wanting to look cool with their business analysis.
Damn, I wish I had a bunch of cool looking words like theirs.
PS If I knew studying the rocket science back in 90s that MBAs will attract all the girls in new millenium...
phatbx133
That's hot 6.9 right there :P
Yogi
That's what you get for choosing a career that requires actual work /s
XP-200
Looks like Nivda put my costly GTX1080 cash to some use. Lol
