[Beowulf] Intel buys QLogic InfiniBand business

[Greg Lindahl]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 11:28:26AM -0800, Greg Lindahl wrote:

> http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-01-23/intel_to_buy_qlogic_s_infiniband_business.html

I figured out the main why:

http://seekingalpha.com/news-article/2082171-qlogic-gains-market-share-in-both-fibre-channel-and-10gb-ethernet-adapter-markets

> Server-class 10Gb Ethernet Adapter and LOM revenues have recently
> surpassed $100 million per quarter, and are on track for about fifty
> percent annual growth, according to Crehan Research.

That's the whole market, and QLogic says they are #1 in the FCoE
adapter segment of this market, and #2 in the overall 10 gig adapter
market (see
http://seekingalpha.com/article/303061-qlogic-s-ceo-discusses-f2q12-results-earnings-call-transcript)

Historically, QLogic had a fibre channel adapter business that was a
huge cash cow, and they bought their way into various markets and had
limited success with them: iscsi, fibre channel switches, and yes,
InfiniBand, where QLogic managed to get some large sales (TriLabs 3 PF
procurement) yet was at only 15%-20% market share.

I'm surprised that QLogic could succeed in 10gige adapters given all
the competition, but hey, I never understood why fibre channel was
popular, either.

Now that QLogic has found what the next best thing after fibre channel
adapters is, they might as well concentrate on it. It'll be
interesting what Intel plans to do in the exascale market. I've
thought for a long time that non-cache-coherent processors like MIC
ought to have InfiniPath-like hardware queues for sending and
receiving short messages efficiently, even on-chip.

Not to mention that whole exascale thing.

-- greg