NVIDIA Confirms It's Acquiring Mellanox

[Gusar]

I can see the support threads now...

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

That was actually the case several years ago, with the NForce 2 motherboard chipset. You needed to install Nvidia's proprietary driver to use the onboard NIC. The chip got reverse-engineered at some point, resulting in the in-kernel forcedeth driver. Nvidia then dropped their proprietary driver and started contributing to forcedeth. So what you wrote here as a joke used to be reality!

[starshipeleven]

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.

I'm really wondering what the actual fuck are you guys on.

Mellanox does not make "LAN" or "networking chips". They make high-bandiwth interconnect cards for datacenters.

Unless the Shield suddenly needs a 40Gbit fiber port (hint: it won't), then Mellanox won't be involved.

[starshipeleven]

That was actually the case several years ago, with the NForce 2 motherboard chipset. You needed to install Nvidia's proprietary driver to use the onboard NIC. The chip got reverse-engineered at some point, resulting in the in-kernel forcedeth driver. Nvidia then dropped their proprietary driver and started contributing to forcedeth. So what you wrote here as a joke used to be reality!

Afaik Mellanox has open drivers already. It would be weird for NVIDIA to close them, it would serve no purpose (on the contrary of their GPU drivers)

[DarkFoss]

That was actually the case several years ago, with the NForce 2 motherboard chipset. You needed to install Nvidia's proprietary driver to use the onboard NIC. The chip got reverse-engineered at some point, resulting in the in-kernel forcedeth driver. Nvidia then dropped their proprietary driver and started contributing to forcedeth. So what you wrote here as a joke used to be reality!

I remember that The Abit NF7-S v1.x was one of my favorite boards.

[cdufour]

Given the use of nVidia products in datacenters and AI/big-data workloads often being bottlenecked by I/Os, it makes entirely sense for nVidia to extend its portfolio with HPC networking products.
Next step would then be to provide RDMA access to GPU RAM and you would have the killer combo.

[Slithery]

So what you wrote here as a joke used to be reality!

Who said I was joking?

If anyone had to take them over I'd have preferred it to be Intel as at least they have a history of decent, well-supported chipsets and open-source drivers for the majority of OS's used in production for the networking hardware that they release.

Nvidia, not so much...

[CochainComplex]

...oh yes!! infiniband RTX Founders Edition with (4,0 Gbit/s) ..i mean 3,5 Gbit/s

[mroche]

I would strongly disagree with anyone who thinks Mellanox is now (or going to be) dead. This is a play by NVIDIA to get further into the HPC space; Mellanox is one of the few providers for low-latency HPC mesh networking infrastructure (we use it here at my university). We pair it with two other networks (1G Eth and 10G Eth) for other storage/maintenance setups. But our primary filesystems (GPFS) all run over IB with Mellanox switches/adapters.

Honestly, smart move on their part.

[Slithery]

Honestly, smart move on their part.

I agree, but personally I hoped that it would be Intel who won the bid.

[numacross]

I'm really wondering what the actual fuck are you guys on.

Mellanox does not make "LAN" or "networking chips". They make high-bandiwth interconnect cards for datacenters.

Unless the Shield suddenly needs a 40Gbit fiber port (hint: it won't), then Mellanox won't be involved.

I'm replying to you via a Mellanox LAN card Granted they start at 10GbE, but it's 2019!