Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B

Re:Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B by angry_octet on Monday March 11, 2019 @05:50PM (#19363185)

There is a lot of heavily patent/trade secret encumbered IP in both graphics and compute drivers, making open source extremely difficult. Above that layer I've found Nvidia extremely open.

Intel is far worse to deal with, and additionally engages in anti-competitive architectural wars, preventing other vendors from interfacing with the CPU bus.

As a result we have NVLink, and now we will soon have official IB cards with NVLink ports, and probably ARM cores too.

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Re:Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B by magduf on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @06:06PM (#19373548)

>There is a lot of heavily patent/trade secret encumbered IP in both graphics and compute drivers, making open source extremely difficult. Above that layer I've found Nvidia extremely open. >Intel is far worse to deal with

Huh? Nvidia is by far the worst option when it comes to GPUs if you want to run Linux. Both Intel and AMD manage to have excellent open source drivers, while Nvidia's is a proprietary mess that everyone complains about and doesn't work all that great with typical distro update mechanisms.

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