NVIDIA Confirms It's Acquiring Mellanox

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Confirms Its Acquiring Mellanox

While earlier this month it looked like Intel was going to be the likely suitor to Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA has managed to edge out Intel and the others bidding for the networking chip provider...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Acquiring-Mellanox

[Redfoxmoon]

R.I.P company.

[ldesnogu]

It's certainly better than the Intel alternative given what they did to most of the companies they acquired.

[brad0]

It's certainly better than the Intel alternative given what they did to most of the companies they acquired.

NVIDIA just turned a great company and great product into worthless garbage. RIP Mellanox. Intel would have been a much better company to purchase them.

[schmidtbag]

I'm not liking the sound of this. Nvidia could've bought them out a while ago if they really wanted, but they seemed to do this only to spite Intel. What this means is Intel basically gave Nvidia a big hint as to what they were planning with Mellanox. Although Nvidia probably doesn't need any of their tech, at this point they're probably like "well we already spent all this money and hampered Intel's progress. Might as well make the most of this and integrate their tech into CUDA" which could mean Nvidia monopolizes even greater on GPU-based servers.

I would be very surprised if CUDA, Quadros, and Teslas don't see a major facelift in the next couple years.


It's not like I'd have wanted Intel to be the winning bidder either, but at least Intel is friendlier toward open standards.

[eydee]

Although Nvidia probably doesn't need any of their tech

Nvidia does things like the Shield and maybe more are coming. Those devices do need networking chips. An offline console in 2019+ could be hardly successful.

You can probably safely assume they won't put LAN ports on the next generation of video cards tho.

[Slithery]

I can see the support threads now...

'How do I install the Nvidia proprietary drivers needed to use my new NIC'.

[anarki2]

Ouch. I expect price hikes and restrictive EULAs. Please prove me wrong...

[ldesnogu]

NVIDIA just turned a great company and great product into worthless garbage. RIP Mellanox. Intel would have been a much better company to purchase them.

What company did NVIDIA turn into worthless garbage?

Intel has a track record of killing perfectly good companies. I know many engineers who were affected by that.

[smotad]

Given the exponential growth of storage, namely Ceph and similar, I think this is a smart investment by Nvidia. Combine it with AI / Data Analysis supported by Nvidia chips and you begin to see the picture.