While I agree about Intel's market force, they have a much better open source software story than nvidia. Nvidia is as closed as the other big player, Broadcom.
I had similar hopes when Intel acquired Altera, however think Intel managed to completely botch that acquisition. I now believe Intels going through a phase where they seem to be struggling to get things out of the door on time (like 10nm, Optane, Xeon Phis, Drones, Nervana, Edison...). At a time where AMD seems to be credibly challenging Intel for the first time in over a decade, any non x86 efforts will likely end up as a side hobby and not get the attention/investment from Intel management that it deserves. As a result I am glad Mellanox did not end up at Intel.
There is a lot of heavily patent/trade secret encumbered IP in both graphics and compute drivers, making open source extremely difficult. Above that layer I've found Nvidia extremely open.
Intel is far worse to deal with, and additionally engages in anti-competitive architectural wars, preventing other vendors from interfacing with the CPU bus.
As a result we have NVLink, and now we will soon have official IB cards with NVLink ports, and probably ARM cores too.
>There is a lot of heavily patent/trade secret encumbered IP in both graphics and compute drivers, making open source extremely difficult. Above that layer I've found Nvidia extremely open.
>Intel is far worse to deal with
Huh? Nvidia is by far the worst option when it comes to GPUs if you want to run Linux. Both Intel and AMD manage to have excellent open source drivers, while Nvidia's is a proprietary mess that everyone complains about and doesn't work all that great with typical distro update mechanisms.