[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.