NVIDIA today announced that it has received approval from all necessary authorities to proceed with its planned acquisition of Mellanox, as announced in March 2019. The latest approval by China's State Administration for Market Regulation follows antitrust approval from the European Commission and Mexico and the expiration of the waiting period under U.S. antitrust laws. With the exception of the remaining customary closing conditions, all conditions to the deal's closing have been satisfied.

NVIDIA announced on March 11, 2019, its intention to acquire Israel-based Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, or $6.9 billion, in a transaction that would combine NVIDIA's leading computing expertise with Mellanox's high-performance interconnect technology. The acquisition is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP EPS and free cash flow. Closing is expected to occur on or about April 27, 2020.

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium, originally established to develop 25, 50 and 100 Gbps Ethernet specifications, announced today it has changed its name to the Ethernet Technology Consortium in order to reflect a new focus on higher-speed Ethernet technologies.

The goal of the consortium is to enhance the Ethernet specification to operate at new speeds by utilizing specifications that are developed or in development. This allows the organization to work alongside other industry groups and standards bodies to adapt Ethernet at a pace that aligns with the rapidly evolving needs of the industry. The ETC has more than 45 members with top-level promoter members that include Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Google, Mellanox and Microsoft.

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the fourth quarter ended Jan. 26, 2020, of $3.11 billion, up 41 percent from $2.21 billion a year earlier, and up 3 percent from $3.01 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.53, up 66 percent from $0.92 a year ago, and up 6 percent from $1.45 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.89, up 136 percent from $0.80 a year earlier, and up 6 percent from $1.78 in the previous quarter.

For fiscal 2020, revenue was $10.92 billion, down 7 percent from $11.72 billion a year earlier. GAAP earnings per diluted share were $4.52, down 32 percent from $6.63 a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $5.79, down 13 percent from $6.64 a year earlier. "Adoption of NVIDIA accelerated computing drove excellent results, with record data center revenue," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Our initiatives are achieving great success.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today introduced the new QXG-10G2T-107, a dual-port PCI Express (PCIe) 10GBASE-T/NBASE-T NIC that supports 5 network speeds. It can be installed in a compatible QNAP NAS or a Windows /Linux PC with PCIe 2.0 x4 slots, providing organizations or individuals with a flexible and economical 10 GbE network connectivity solution.

The QXG-10G2T-107 uses the Aquantia AQtion AQC107S Ethernet controller that supports 10/5/2.5/1 Gbps and 100 Mbps network speeds. The RJ45 connector design also allows users to use existing cables. Transmission speeds can reach up to 5 Gbps when using CAT-5e cables, or up to 10 Gbps when using CAT 6 (or advanced versions) cables, unleashing the full potential of the QXG-10G2T-107.

NVIDIA today reported revenue for the second quarter ended July 28, 2019, of $2.58 billion compared with $3.12 billion a year earlier and $2.22 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.90, compared with $1.76 a year ago and $0.64 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.24 compared with $1.94 a year earlier and $0.88 in the previous quarter.

"We achieved sequential growth across our platforms," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Real-time ray tracing is the most important graphics innovation in a decade. Adoption has reached a tipping point, with NVIDIA RTX leading the way. "NVIDIA accelerated computing momentum continues to build as the industry races to enable the next frontier in artificial intelligence, conversational AI, as well as autonomous systems like self-driving vehicles and delivery robots," he said.

NVIDIA today announced its support for Arm CPUs, providing the high performance computing industry a new path to build extremely energy-efficient, AI-enabled exascale supercomputers. NVIDIA is making available to the Arm ecosystem its full stack of AI and HPC software - which accelerates more than 600 HPC applications and all AI frameworks - by year's end. The stack includes all NVIDIA CUDA-X AI and HPC libraries, GPU-accelerated AI frameworks and software development tools such as PGI compilers with OpenACC support and profilers. Once stack optimization is complete, NVIDIA will accelerate all major CPU architectures, including x86, POWER and Arm.

"Supercomputers are the essential instruments of scientific discovery, and achieving exascale supercomputing will dramatically expand the frontier of human knowledge," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "As traditional compute scaling ends, power will limit all supercomputers. The combination of NVIDIA's CUDA-accelerated computing and Arm's energy-efficient CPU architecture will give the HPC community a boost to exascale."

NVIDIA and Mellanox today announced that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox. Pursuant to the agreement, NVIDIA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion. Once complete, the combination is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP earnings per share and free cash flow.

The acquisition will unite two of the world's leading companies in high performance computing (HPC). Together, NVIDIA's computing platform and Mellanox's interconnects power over 250 of the world's TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker. The data and compute intensity of modern workloads in AI, scientific computing and data analytics is growing exponentially and has put enormous performance demands on hyperscale and enterprise datacenters. While computing demand is surging, CPU performance advances are slowing as Moore's law has ended. This has led to the adoption of accelerated computing with NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox's intelligent networking solutions.

Late January it was reported that Intel is looking to buy out Israeli networking hardware maker Mellanox Technology, in what looked like a cakewalk USD $6 billion deal at the time, which was a 35 percent premium over the valuation of Mellanox. Turns out, Intel hasn't closed the deal, and there are other big tech players in the foray for Mellanox, the most notable being NVIDIA. The GPU giant has reportedly offered Mellanox a competitive bid of $7 billion.

NVIDIA eyes a slice of the data-center networking hardware pie since the company has invested heavily in GPU-based AI accelerators and its own high-bandwidth interconnect dubbed NVLink, and now needs to complete its hardware ecosystem with NICs and switches under its own brand. Founded in 1999 in Yoqneam, Israel, Mellanox designs high performance network processors and fully-built NICs in a wide range of data-center relevant interconnects. Intel is by far the biggest tech company operating in Israel, with not just R&D centers, but also manufacturing sites, in stark contrast to NVIDIA, which opened its first R&D office in 2017 with a few hundred employees.

Update: NVIDIA's bid for Mellanox stands at $7 billion.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today unveiled the new dual-port 25GbE QXG-25G2SF-CX4 and 10GbE QXG-10G2SF-CX4 network NICs. Featuring Mellanox ConnectX -4 Lx SmartNIC controllers, these cards can greatly boost file transfer speeds and also support iSER (iSCSI Extension for RDMA) to optimize VMware virtualization. Both cards are PCIe Gen3 ×8 and can be installed in a Windows /Linux PC or compatible QNAP NAS.

Cloud, big data, high-speed storage, virtualization, and AI are strongly pushing 25GbE into the mainstream," said Dan Lin, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "QNAP now provides users with a scalable solution for adopting 25GbE infrastructure by leveraging the industry-leading Mellanox Ethernet solution to deliver a next-gen 25GbE NIC for NAS, servers and workstations."

Intel is in the fray to acquire Israeli networking infrastructure manufacturer Mellanox Technology for $6 billion in cash and shares, which constitute a 35 percent premium over its most recent valuation. Mellanox designs and manufactures infrastructure-scale networking hardware, such as high-bandwidth switches, adapters, and other data-center networking hardware, and when acquired by Intel, could give the company sufficient IP and manpower to take on Chinese networking equipment giant Huawei, in the gold-rush to bring 5G to the world, in addition to sustaining the cloud-computing boom. Huawei has been banned in several western nations (particularly NATO member states) for political or strategic reasons, and a large vacuum has been built that's being approached by other "Kosher" players such as Mellanox, Cisco, etc.

QNAP Systems, Inc. (QNAP), a leading storage, network and computing solution provider, today launched the Intel Xeon E based TS-x83XU enterprise NAS series with ECC DDR4 memory that delivers server-class performance and dependable reliability. All models in the series feature two 10GbE SFP+ ports using Mellanox ConnectX -4 Lx SmartNIC controllers and support installing a PCIe graphics card for empowering video surveillance, virtual machines and AI applications. Coupled with QNAP's exclusive software-defined SSD extra over-provisioning and comprehensive virtualization capabilities, the TS-x83XU series provides a high-performance and dependable - yet cost-efficient - NAS solution for uncompromising enterprise IT requirements.

The TS-x83XU was specifically designed for enterprises that require server-class standards of performance and reliability for business-critical data and applications," said David Tsao, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "businesses and organizations can unlock greater application potential and increase their everyday working efficiency by leveraging game-changing features such as PCIe expandability, SSD-optimization technologies, and tiered storage."

It has been a huge weekend of product announcements and launches from AMD, which expanded not just its client computing CPU lineup on both ends, but also expanded its Radeon graphics cards family with both client- and professional-segment graphics cards. This article provides a brief summary of everything AMD launched or announced today, with their possible market-availability dates.

On the heels of the recent Gen-Z interconnect announcement, an aggregate of some of the most recognizable names in the tech industry have once again banded together. This time, it's an effort towards the implementation of a fast, coherent and widely compatible interconnect technology that will pave the way towards tighter integration of ever-more heterogeneous systems.

Technology leaders AMD, Dell EMC, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, NVIDIA and Xilinx announced the new open standard to appropriate fanfare, considering the promises of an up-to 10x performance uplift in datacenter server environments, thus accelerating big-data, machine learning, analytics, and other emerging workloads. The interconnect promises to provide a high-speed pathway towards tighter integration between different types of technology currently making up the heterogeneous server computing's needs, ranging through fixed-purpose accelerators, current and future system memory subsistems, and coherent storage and network controllers.

A group of leading technology companies today announced the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today's bottlenecks. The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK hynix, Western Digital Corporation, and Xilinx.

Modern computer systems have been built around the assumption that storage is slow, persistent and reliable, while data in memory is fast but volatile. As new storage class memory technologies emerge that drive the convergence of storage and memory attributes, the programmatic and architectural assumptions that have worked in the past are no longer optimal. The challenges associated with explosive data growth, real-time application demands, the emergence of low latency storage class memory, and demand for rack scale resource pools require a new approach to data access.

IBM, in collaboration with NVIDIA and Mellanox, today announced the establishment of a POWER Acceleration and Design Center in Montpellier, France to advance the development of data-intensive research, industrial, and commercial applications. Born out of the collaborative spirit fostered by the OpenPOWER Foundation - a community co-founded in part by IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox supporting open development on top of the POWER architecture - the new Center provides commercial and open-source software developers with technical assistance to enable them to develop high performance computing (HPC) applications.

Technical experts from IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox will help developers take advantage of OpenPOWER systems leveraging IBM's open and licensable POWER architecture with the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform and Mellanox InfiniBand networking solutions. These are the class of systems developed collaboratively with the U.S. Department of Energy for the next generation Sierra and Summit supercomputers and to be used by the United Kingdom's Science and Technology Facilities Council's Hartree Centre for big data research.

August 26, 2013 - OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, and Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center and storage systems, have collaborated together to deliver flash I/O storage performance and complete fault tolerance (FT) to VMware clusters on top of on-host server flash and hard disk drives (HDDs). These SAN-less, fault tolerant capabilities will be presented in OCZ's booth (#711) at VMworld 2013, Moscone Convention Center, today through August 29th.

The combination of the Mellanox ConnectX-3 EN 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network interface card (NIC) with OCZ's VXL Software replicates VMware datastores in virtualized SAN-less clusters. The combined solutions deliver industry-leading Ethernet connectivity, intelligent and efficient cache and flash volume distribution of PCI Express (PCIe) flash resources while enabling High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerance (FT) services of VMware clusters.

Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan today announced plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium - an open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers.

The move makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making POWER IP licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions. By doing this, IBM and the consortium can offer unprecedented customization in creating new styles of server hardware for a variety of computing workloads.

AMD today announced availability of servers based on its AMD Open 3.0 specification, defined as part of the Open Compute Project, delivering workload versatility and performance equal to competing proprietary OEM servers at significantly lower cost. In comparison to benchmarks running virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the AMD Open 3.0-based system supported just as many virtual desktops and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) by 57 percent: $4,589 versus $10,669 for just a single server. This cost effectiveness translates into a dramatic reduction in cost per virtual desktop, from $91.19 to only $38.24 per desktop. More details on the findings are available online and will be discussed at a roundtable event tomorrow in New York City and other select cities. The servers will be available through distributor partners.

"Global IT organizations have the difficult task of choosing between price and performance when investing in servers," said Bob Ogrey, cloud evangelist and fellow, AMD. "We don't believe organizations have to compromise one for the other. Using systems based on the AMD Open 3.0 specification -- the first open source, modular platform for the masses -- enables high performance and energy efficiency at a reasonable price, making it the best choice for organizations.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. , a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and green computing, has upgraded its line of A+ servers with the just released AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron 6300 Series processors. The new A+ server and tower platforms deliver up to 24 percent higher performance over prior generation solutions and maximize processor density and core counts to support more VMs for public and private cloud deployments. Performance per watt is up to 40 percent higher with intelligent thermal/power monitoring and management, enabling datacenters running robust large-scale software systems to maximize performance while lowering overall TCO. With dual-processor (DP) and multi-processor (MP) architectures, Supermicro ups the performance bar for data center and high-performance computing (HPC) cluster applications.

AMD today announced its continued leadership in high performance computing (HPC) with 24 of the top 100 supercomputers in the 39th TOP500 list, announced today, while making significant strides in maturing its HPC ecosystem through the addition of several key components that enable end users to continue to benefit from best-in-class price/performance for today's demanding applications.

AMD has continued to work closely with its technology partners to significantly mature its HPC ecosystem, resulting in several new developments including LS-DYNA simulation software optimized for the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors from Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC), the addition of programming options for AMD graphics processor unit (GPU) technology from CAPS, and the announcement by Mellanox Technologies of its Connect-IB products that will deliver FDR 56 Gb/s InfiniBand speeds to AMD's solution portfolios.

SGI, the trusted leader in technical computing, announced today that with over 60 miles of InfiniBand cabling in place at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., a scientist was able to utilize 25,000 SGI ICE Intel Xeon processor cores on Pleiades to run a space weather simulation.

One particular area of study is magnetic reconnection, a physical process in highly conducting plasmas such as those that occur in the Earth's magnetosphere, in which the magnetic topology is rearranged and magnetic energy converted to kinetic or thermal energy. This field of research is critical, as these disturbances can disable wide scale power grids, affect satellite transmissions and disrupt airline communications.

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced two new products as part of its suite of end-to-end 10 Gigabit and 40 Gigabit Ethernet solutions. The SwitchX SX1024 is the industry's only top-of-rack switch system that features 48 SFP+ 10GbE server ports and 12 QSFP 40GbE ports for non-blocking connectivity to 40GbE aggregation switches, such as Mellanox's SX1036 36-port 40GbE switch. The ConnectX-3 single-port 10GbE NIC offers cost-effective, high density server connectivity. The new low-power 10GbE products support all major operating systems, and are well suited for server and storage applications in high-performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, financial services, storage and Cloud computing environments.