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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

How bad is it that Intel didn't win?

If Intel had one, they would have further consolidated their hold on the HPC/Supercomputer market. Summit is an interesting supercomputer because it's NVidia/Mellanox/IBM instead of the Intel hegemony that Cori II was, iirc the interconnect for Cori was from Cray.

Now NVidia only needs to buy Xilinx...

No way. Xilinx is way too expensive already.

There were only ever two major Infiniband vendors: QLogic and Mellanox. Intel already bought QLogic back in 2012.

I'm not sure it would be in anyone's interest for both to be acquired by Intel, even if IB isn't very relevant anymore outside of supercomputing.

Intel bought QLogic's Infiniband assets in 2012, not everything.

> Intel already bought QLogic back in 2012.

Cavium bought QLogic in 2016, Marvell in turn bought Cavium in 2018.

It is remarkable they were outbid.

This acquisition has big implications for HPC in particular.

Yeah, Intel is just a bit over 2x the size of Nvidia, and yet they were outbid... to me this is like Apple not being willing to buy Waze and letting them go to Google. Think of what improvement it could have made on Apple maps.

Not that bad - intel already has an arguably strong networking department and recently purchased Altera for their FPGA tech. This is why above comments mention the benefits of nVidia purchasing Xilinx - one of the only other serious producers of cutting edge FPGA hardware - which happens to be what makes or breaks most high-throughput networking tech.

But now Nvidia is only a single HPC worthy Arm CPU away from owning all the juicy bits of a HPC: they have the GPUs, now the networking, all they need is the CPUs... vertical integration has its perks.

Yeah - I think this potential next step for nVidia has both good and bad intentions for the world of HPC. However, it'll be interesting to see how they compete with the existing "NetFPGA" open source project. They've essentially been building purpose-built offerings analogous to Intel's recently announced "Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000".

IMO, more of the issues with these advanced networking protocols is latency - something that is usually more addressable via protocol dev than just hardware. Would be very interesting to see nVidia try to acquire Xilinx and supercharge their "Aurora" low overhead transfer protocol...

sources:

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/2019-mwc-intel-announces-nex...

https://netfpga.org/

Xilinx is badly overpriced, no matter how you look at it. You could compare its P/E to similar semiconductor companies, you could compare it to all US companies, you could even look at the predicted P/E growth and it's still overpriced. Every analyst I am aware of currently advises you stay away from XLNX.

> Xilinx is badly overpriced, no matter how you look at it.

Is it, really?

FPGA's are now all over HPC, the 5G rollout is going to put a LOT of really expensive FPGA's in new towers, and high-end networking gear is about to get a bump due to PCI going up.

I don't know how much damage the Intel acquisition did to Altera, but if Altera has been AWOL with big customers due to the Intel acquisition, Xilinx may have a massive amount of customer wins locked in for a very long time.

I wish Xilinx would die in a hot flaming pit of Hell for many and various reasons, but they are the 500lb gorilla of FPGAs.

Well, let's look at numbers, shall we? XLNX P/E is 37, INTC P/E is 12, MRVL P/E is 22.8, AVGO is 23.19, the current S&P 500 PE is 21.34. Of course P/E is just one number but it's certainly one important number. Do you have a better comparison that makes XLNX at this price an alluring stock?

My original comment reacted to nVidia acquiring Xilinx and I am trying to explain why that won't happen: it's too expensive.

As someone on the sidelines I can confirm that dev boards / most Xilinx products seem to have markedly hire price tags than comparable products from competitors...

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