News China Approves Nvidia's Mellanox Deal, Could Be the Ammunition Needed to Fight AMD and Intel in Exascale

[Admin]

Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition has finally been approved, which is important as the company battles both AMD and Intel.

China Approves Nvidia's Mellanox Deal, Could Be the Ammunition Needed to Fight AMD and Intel in Exascale : Read more

 

[JayNor]

both NVidia and AMD have joined the consortium for the PCIE5/CXL technology that Intel developed to enable asymmetric cache coherence between CPU and accelerators.

Intel is using that next year on the Aurora.

 

[Deicidium369]

With both CXL (intra rack) and GenZ (inter rack) the space for Mellanox is going to shrink - Infiniband was originally designed to tie multiple machines together in a cluster - IB was high speed, ultra low latency (just like GenZ) connect. I don't think that all servers will be using GenZ or CXL for that matter - but this has been the first real industry supported challenger to IB.

I see CXL as being ubiquitous - since Intel is the originator and dominant data center supplier - and with it's full range of accelerators - from FPGA to AI (Nervana, Habana)... all CXL ready for PCIe Gen5 and probably not too long after Gen 6. This move to dis-aggregation makes at least CXL a sure thing.

 

[jeremyj_83]

With both CXL (intra rack) and GenZ (inter rack) the space for Mellanox is going to shrink - Infiniband was originally designed to tie multiple machines together in a cluster - IB was high speed, ultra low latency (just like GenZ) connect. I don't think that all servers will be using GenZ or CXL for that matter - but this has been the first real industry supported challenger to IB.

I see CXL as being ubiquitous - since Intel is the originator and dominant data center supplier - and with it's full range of accelerators - from FPGA to AI (Nervana, Habana)... all CXL ready for PCIe Gen5 and probably not too long after Gen 6. This move to dis-aggregation makes at least CXL a sure thing.

You are forgetting that Mellanox doesn't make only Infiinband products. They are currently the only company that makes the ICs, sells their own ICs, and white-boxes ICs for people like Dell, HP, etc... On top of that their Ethernet products are always at the same performance level as Broadcom. Also IB is primarily used in the HPC & Super Computers of the world, granted Ethernet is still more prevalent there. GenZ is nice, but for a while it will be a niche product and during that time Mellanox can get things to work GenZ and their other products.

 

[bit_user]

@PaulAlcorn

Nvidia might suffer in the supercomputer realm because it doesn't produce both CPUs and GPUs

Nvidia designed several generations of custom ARM cores for their self-driving, tablet, and embedded SoCs. I know it's not the same thing as building server CPUs, but also not that far off.

 

[castl3bravo]

@PaulAlcorn

Nvidia designed several generations of custom ARM cores for their self-driving, tablet, and embedded SoCs. I know it's not the same thing as building server CPUs, but also not that far off.

Sounds like Jensen continues to play catch up while Lisa has been making the right decisions since taking control "temporarily" as CEO. If Jensen tries to force additional revenue out of its ARM acquisition I would expect to see Lisa and Intel to easily counter it with competing products.