Computer hardware company
Nvidia is to acquire chipmaker Mellanox Technologies (Mellanox). Nvidia, which has headquarters in Santa Clara, California, United States, was established in 1993. The company is recognized as being the inventor of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) - a move that “sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics, and revolutionized parallel computing”. Its more recent focus has been in Artificial Intelligence (AI) where the GPU acts as “the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world”. Nvidia’s acquisition of Mellanox is reported to have cost the company $6.9 billion.
Mellanox is an Israeli company with global headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, United States and Yokneam, Israel. The company offers end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services which include interconnect products (adapters, switches, software and silicon). Its solutions are utilized by “many of the world’s largest data center servers and storage systems” and are designed to “increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency”. This means application data can be delivered faster thus enhancing system performance capability. Mellanox provides an excellent fit with Nvidia and combined they cater to 250 of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The deal is expected to be finished by the end of the year.
“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” explained NVIDIA’s founder and CEO,
Jensen Huang. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine. We’re excited to unite NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform with Mellanox’s world-renowned accelerated networking platform under one roof to create next-generation datacenter-scale computing solutions. I am particularly thrilled to work closely with the visionary leaders of Mellanox and their amazing people to invent the computers of tomorrow.”
“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” added Mellanox founder and CEO, Eyal Waldman. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures. This combination will foster the creation of powerful technology and fantastic opportunities for our people.”
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