[dogma1138]

One out of only 2 vendors for InfiniBand which is quite important for HPC especially in the Top 500.

They also have some sort of a parallel VLIW CPU architecture that they've been trying to get off the ground for a while now called TILE/TILE64 so that might also play into things.

However since NVIDIA opened their offices in Israel a while ago they might simply be looking for an acquihire since Mellanox is a fabless semi chip maker it kinda fits that also.

[drewg123]

I hope that it is more than an aqui-hire.

Mellanox has driven IB speeds for more than a decade, limited only by PCIe bandwidth. Since they've had NICs that do both IB and Ethernet, they've been driving the ethernet market as well. We've been using their 100G adapters since 2015 (when they were first to market by a big margin). Even today, there are only a handful of vendors that can deliver a 100g NIC. I worry that if Mellanox stops driving port speed, we'll see a slower increase in the speed of NICs due to the lack of competition (eg, 400g will take longer..).

[shaklee3]

Infiniband hasn't increased in speed in a while, while Ethernet has. IB is all but done since Ethernet 200 and 400Gbps will be out soon, and in fact, are already supported by Mellanox switches.

[dogma1138]

From what I understand the reason it hasn't increased is because primarily of PCIe, it is set to double in speed with PCIe 4.0 and again with 5.0 once those are made more available with maximum speeds of 1.6 and 4.0 TB for IB x16.

IB still has lower latency than Ethernet at least on paper especially when it comes to RDMA but I don't know how much of an issue that is for these applications.

But overall I'm not sure how much it matters to Mellanox since they are also the ones who are making the high speed Ethernet switches and host adapters.

[shaklee3]

Yup, but that's exactly why IB isn't too relevant anymore. Ethernet had plenty of time to catch up because of PCIe-SIG and Intel dragging their feet.

[dogma1138]

It doesn’t matter nearly all Mellanox ASICs support both IB and Ethernet they are the ones who are driving the speed of Ethernet to this level.

You also need to use their cables and transceivers (or a similar alternative) for these speeds doesn’t matter if you are using Ethernet or IB.

[shaklee3]

You can use non-mellanox cables for ethernet. IB there aren't really other options.

[opencl]

The last new TILE architecture chip shipped over 5 years ago and Linux dropped support for the architecture completely last year.

[jandrese]

TILE64 got squeezed at both ends, with GPUs becoming more capable on one side and CPUs getting lots of cores (Threadripper) on the other. The niche just closed up on them.

[mcbain]

Tilera was acquired by EZChip in 2014 and then in turn EZChip were acquired by Mellanox - the Tile arch kind of died from lack of attention during that process.

I had a TileGX dev board and ported our product at the time (nearly 10 years ago). It was an ok arch but that’s a tough niche to fight for.

[GordonS]

That'd be a lot of money for an aquihire. Are you aware of any other aquihire's in the billion dollar range?

[dogma1138]

Don't think so, but they do have like 3000 employees mainly in Israel and design a wide range of ASICs I doubt that they got them for the InfiniBand and their interconnect business alone.

[dkersten]

Oh. I've known about TILE64 back when Tilera created it (I spoke to their VP of something or other on the phone once, I worked in telecoms at the time and we were interested in seeing if their hardware would help accelerate something we worked on. We never went forward with it though), I hadn't realised Mellanox owned it now. Looking at wikipedia, Tilera was bought by EZChip, which was bought by Mellanox.

[wtallis]

I think Mellanox is moving away from the Tilera architecture in favor of re-using the mesh interconnect with ARM cores, as in their BlueField chip.

[dogma1138]

Could be, but their mesh fabric might be useful for some multi-GPU configurations especially if NVIDIA goes into chiplets, I don't know if it's better than NVLINK or not but since NVLINK looks to be pretty much PCIe with a lot of the overhead stripped out of it it just might be.