NVIDIA announced this week that it has acquired Mellanox, a major manufacturer of communications equipment for data centers and high-performance computing (HPC), for $6,9 billion. And such an acquisition, so atypical for a GPU developer, for which NVIDIA decided to even outbid Intel, is not at all accidental. As NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang commented on the deal, the purchase of Mellanox was a very important investment for the company, since we are talking about a global change in strategy.
The fact that NVIDIA has long been trying to increase its income, which it receives from sales of equipment for supercomputers and data centers, is not a secret. GPU applications outside of gaming PCs are multiplying every day, and Mellanox's intellectual property should help NVIDIA develop its own big data solutions. The fact that NVIDIA was willing to spend a huge sum to buy a communications company is a good reflection of the attention given to this area. And what's more, gamers should no longer have any illusions: satisfying their interests is no longer a primary goal for NVIDIA.
Jensen Huang said this directly in his interview with HPC Wire, which took place after the announcement of the purchase of Mellanox. βData centers are the most important computers today and in the future. Workloads continue to change driven by artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics, so future data centers will be built like huge, powerful computers. We were a GPU company, then we became a GPU platform manufacturer. Now we have become a computing company that started with chips and is expanding into data centers.β
Recall that Mellanox is an Israeli company that has advanced technologies for connecting nodes in data centers and high-performance systems. In particular, Mellanox networking solutions are now also used in DGX-2, a supercomputer system based on Volta GPUs offered by NVIDIA for solving problems in the field of deep learning and data analysis.
βWe believe that in future data centers, computing will not start and end in servers. The calculations will spread to the network. In the long term, I think we have the ability to build data center-scale computing architectures,β explains NVIDIA CEO Mellanox. Indeed, NVIDIA now has the necessary technologies to build end-to-end high-performance solutions that include both GPU arrays and external connections.
For now, NVIDIA continues to maintain its strong dependence on the gaming graphics market. Despite all the efforts made, gamers still bring the bulk of the company's revenue. So, in the fourth quarter of last year, NVIDIA earned $ 954 million from the sale of gaming equipment, while the company earned less from data center solutions - $ 679 million. Nevertheless, sales of computing systems grew by 12%, while volumes sales of gaming video cards have fallen by 45%. And this leaves no doubt that in the future NVIDIA will primarily rely on data centers and high-performance computing.
Source: 3dnews.ru