A big point of news today, NVIDIA announced it will acquire Mellanox for $6.9 billion. When it was rumored that Intel was shopping for Mellanox, we had A Product Perspective on an Intel Bid for Mellanox. The $6.9 billion price tag is high, but through cost synergies and potentially raising prices or getting higher attach rates, this is a case that NVIDIA can make. We will let others do the financial breakdown, but I wanted to give a quick perspective from the product side.

Mellanox Acquisition a Prelude to NVIDIA Servers?

Here is the wildcard that I wanted to start with. What if NVIDIA is making servers? Taking a moment to see the key parts to today’s GPU servers:

CPU for the OS, data preparation and PCIe connectivity

GPU-to-GPU connectivity via the CPU PCIe lanes, PCIe switches, and/or NVLink

Network fabric to cluster larger HPC and deep learning training systems

Local cache storage and network storage

Chassis, packaging, and cooling

Software and framework support

If we go down this list, with Mellanox, NVIDIA now has everything.

CPU for NVIDIA GPU Severs

CPU wise, NVIDIA still heavily uses Intel CPUs. We are seeing alternatives in POWER9 and AMD EPYC, notably, we just reviewed a single socket AMD EPYC server, the Gigabyte W291-Z00 with 4x NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB GPUs. That configuration would not be possible on an Intel Xeon Scalable system since it would need a PCIe switch due to a lack of PCIe lanes for Intel. We just covered the Journey to Next-Gen Arm Neoverse N1 and E1 Cores where NVIDIA could be making its own Arm server CPUs which it already has some experience in with the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 series.

NVIDIA already has some IP to do this, and Arm’s vision with the Neoverse N1 and subsequent generations is that it will be easier for NVIDIA to make bigger chips going forward.

GPU-to-GPU Connectivity

On the GPU-to-GPU connectivity, Mellanox is interesting. When we did the Mellanox BlueField BF1600 and BF1700 4 Million IOPS NVMeoF Controllers piece, we showed how Mellanox has an Arm CPU powered device with its network IP and its PCIe switch IP integrated. We even asked at Flash Memory Summit 2018 if indeed this was their own PCIe switch IP or Broadcom/ Avago’s and we were told it was Mellanox’s.

If one takes a step back, BlueField is not just a potential HPC/ deep learning training NVMeoF storage building block. Instead, it is a device with Arm CPU cores, Mellanox Networking IP, and PCIe 4.0 connectivity, including a PCIe switch. There are also accelerators for NVMeoF and RDMA duties. It does not require a leap of logic for someone sitting at NVIDIA to think about its GPUs working on the platform. Further, Mellanox has PCIe Gen4 support on their NICs as well as in Bluefield, and NVIDIA has the SerDes support on its Tesla cards. BlueField is a model for NVIDIA to get faster connectivity without waiting years for Intel to catch up.

The flip side is that if NVIDIA took this model, and made the Arm SoC plus high-speed I/O a part of its future GPUs, we could be seeing a new generation of fabric attached GPUs without servers. Imagine a datacenter full of NVMeoF and GPUoF. If you think architecture is moving towards a more disaggregated model, this is a way to get there. Of course, to do this, NVIDIA would need to solve the scale out v. scale up advantages problem.

Network Fabric

The networking side makes perfect sense. We highlighted the trend again in our piece: Top500 November 2018 Our New Systems Analysis and What Must Stop. Here is one chart from that:

Here, Ethernet is winning and InfiniBand is #2. Mellanox dominates InfiniBand and it has significantly better high-speed Ethernet implementations than Intel, especially from the 40GbE Mellanox ConnectX-3 generation and beyond.

Intel practically gave Omni-Path (OPA100) away to get its foot in the door. Although Intel Skylake Omni-Path fabric does not work on every motherboard, we saw in our Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Benchmarks and Review why at under a $200 premium, OPA was inexpensive and compelling to add to Skylake-SP HPC systems. Even with prices several times higher, Mellanox was still winning with Infiniband and Ethernet was beating both.

We covered this in our A Product Perspective on an Intel Bid for Mellanox piece, but while we use Intel heavily at 1GbE and 10GbE generations, we have slowed using Intel for high-speed networking. Intel Fortville may have used less power and heat, but Mellanox pulled ahead with offloads. In the 25GbE / 100GbE generation, we are almost all Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx and Mellanox ConnectX-5 in the STH DemoEval lab. As an aside, our recent Inspur Systems NF5468M5 review system was configured for a large Chinese CSP and came with dual Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx cards which shows Mellanox penetration into CSP GPU systems.

Beyond the internal NICs, Mellanox also makes high-performance Ethernet and InfiniBand switches. We actually had Intel switches in our Supermicro SuperBlade GPU System Review and Supermicro MicroBlade Review, but eventually, Broadcom based switches supplanted their Intel counterparts in those chassis. We have an Intel OPA100 switch in the lab, but that is relatively unused due to a smaller ecosystem than InfiniBand.

Local and Network Storage

For storage, BlueField had local NVMe accelerator support, as well as NVMeoF support for networked storage. Mellanox NICs have offloads for high-performance network storage. This one seems easy and is something that NVIDIA did not have expertise in prior to the Mellanox announcement.

The company was even pushing into FPGA offloads for networking, network storage, and inferencing with its Mellanox Innova-2 with 25GbE and Xilinx FPGA product.

For NVIDIA, it has the ability to leverage the NVMe and NVMeoF ecosystems to feed its GPU servers, and Mellanox has been a leader in this space beyond just simple NICs and switches.

Chassis, Packaging, and Cooling

On the chassis, packaging, and cooling sides, NVIDIA has been pioneering topologies with systems such as its NVIDIA DGX-2.

It has then been using a model to enable partners with platforms like the NVIDIA HGX-2. Of course, NVIDIA relies upon Mellanox NICs like the Mellanox ConnectX-5 VPI 100GbE and EDR InfiniBand cards to provide networking fabric.

Whenever we configure and build platforms based on these HGX designs, such as the Gigabyte G481-S80 we called the DGX1.5, we always configure them with Mellanox NICs.

While Intel still has not shipped its 100GbE generation of Ethernet NICs, and its OPA100 support is stalling, Mellanox ConnectX-6 is bringing 200GbE and HDR Infiniband fabric to HPC. With Mellanox, NVIDIA is getting the best PCIe Gen3 and PCIe Gen4 network fabrics before others do.

If you want to sell high-margin servers, selling the best GPUs and the best scale-out fabric is the way to go. NVIDIA has already been selling this package and the cooling required to keep everything running including high-speed PHYs.

Software Support

When it comes to software support, Mellanox support in NVIDIA systems is excellent.

We recommend our readers who want the easiest scale-out experience to use Mellanox networking in their NVIDIA Tesla servers because the out-of-box functionality is generally good.

Summing Up NVIDIA Products with Mellanox

With Mellanox, NVIDIA will have a broader portfolio to sell to CSPs and server vendors. For the vast majority of the market, that is a good sign. AMD may not like NVIDIA-branded Mellanox NICs in its AMD EPYC or GPU servers, but it will be the best option out there. Current AMD EPYC servers use Intel NICs as we saw in our Gigabyte MZ01-CE0 review as an example.

On the Intel side, there should be a $900M fund aimed at networking starting today. Intel does not have a competitive high-speed network fabric portfolio today. Omni-Path is still at 100Gbps while InfiniBand and Ethernet are now at 200Gbps. Intel’s fastest publicly available NICs only service 25GbE/ 40GbE networking. Intel has not had a competitive switch product released in years. The fact that NVIDIA outbid Intel for Mellanox by perhaps $900M means one of two scenarios:

Intel is exiting the high-performance networking market. Perhaps only playing with low-end NICs like the Intel XXV710 with inferior offload capabilities. Intel decided it can invest the incremental Mellanox bid differential and revamp its networking portfolio through acquisition (e.g. Chelsio/ SolarFlare) or through internal R&D.

Beyond Intel, the benefits to consumers for tighter fabric and GPUs can make sense, although Mellanox already invested heavily on this. A worry in the market can be the “Broadcomification” of another segment. We covered this in a very related segment years ago in our piece Business side of PLX acquisition: Impediment to NVMe everywhere. Broadcom’s aggressive bundling and sales practices are still cited as a pain point by server vendors.

Final Words

These types of acquisitions are fun. With GTC 2019 happening next week, the company may be rolling out a more complete vision for the combined company soon.

Personally, I am hoping for GPUoF. Think of the NVIDIA Tesla T4 attached to an ultra-lightweight system all connected via network fabric. That would absolutely change the economics of inferencing at the edge as well as NVIDIA’s deep learning to inferencing value proposition.