Three recent and unrelated events confirm the ever-growing importance of the technologies and architectures used to connect processing elements at all levels – within a chip, among chips, within a datacenter. Other significant announcements made over the past few days concern the growing RISC-V ecosystem; the first Arm Neoverse system development platform on TSMC 7nm process technology; and EDA/T&M vendors getting ready for USB4.
Bit Traffic
On March 11, the GPU vendor Nvidia announced the acquisition of Mellanox, a key player in high-performance interconnect technologies. With this acquisition, Nvidia aims at optimizing datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost. According to Nvidia, datacenters in the future will be architected as giant compute engines with tens of thousands of compute nodes, designed holistically with their interconnects for optimal performance. Hence the strategic importance of joining forces with Mellanox.
