It’s a bit more complicated than that, though. When we sold IB products (and I know this, because I was in the IB group), we re-sold Mellanox ASICs. This inherently limited the directions of our innovation. Plus, we only worked on the network side of HPC.

But now we sell servers, and we control an entire solution from the BIOS to the network switches. This is a fundamentally different playground than designing around someone else’s network ASIC — there’s soooo much that we can do. Put it this way: low latency is the first (and probably most obvious) HPC-related feature that we could do. But if you think about it a little, the possibilities of what can be done are endless. You’ll see more from us in this area.

Put differently: back in IB days, we had many, many customers tell us, “There are a few things I like about IB. But I *really* like Ethernet. So take those few things that I like about IB and give me better Ethernet.” Ultra low latency is the just latest feature towards the goal of delivering better Ethernet.

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Greets
Florian

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