On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 11:29:35AM -0800, Håkon Bugge wrote: > That can explain why QLogic is selling, but not why Intel is buying.
That's right. This was probably bought, not sold. If you look at the press release Intel put out, it's all about Exascale computing. http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/01/23/intel-takes-key-step-in-accelerating-high-performance-computing-with-infiniband-acquisition If you want to put an IB HCA in a CPU or a {north,south}bridge, TrueScale nee InfiniPath is a much smaller implementation than others, and most of the chip is memory, which Intel knows how to shrink drastically compared to the usual way people implement memory. Also, keep in mind that Intel's benchmarking group in Moscow has a lot of experience with benchmarking real apps for bids using TrueScale head-to-head against other HCAs, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case that TrueScale QDR is faster than that other company's FDR on many real codes, for the usual reason that TrueScale's MPI-oriented InfiniBand extension is more suited for MPI than the standard InfiniBand has-more-features-than-MPI-requires protocols. Finally, I haven't seen it mentioned whether or not QLogic's IB switch was part of the purchase. If it is, then you should note that it's not hard to make that chip speak ethernet, and Intel could probably dramatically improve it with their superior serdes technology. -- greg _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
