Intel acquire QLogic Infiniband business for $125 million

Intel have paid out $125 million to acquire the InfiniBand switch and adapter product range from QLogic.

The move was noted on The Register last night and will help Intel improve their Data Center and Connected Systems business by asking network equipment providers to use Xeon processors inside their networking equipment. It will help them improve their revenues from over $10 billion to break the $20 billion barrier.

The Register add “The plan is to kill off mainframes and RISC machines, and to get Xeons inside of storage and network gear – but it also includes Intel being a major supplier of chips used in high speed switches.

Last July, Intel paid an undisclosed amount to get its hands on Fulcrum Microsystems, a maker of the FocalPoint family of ASICs for Ethernet switches and routers that run at 10GbE and 40GbE speeds. Fulcrum's most famous customer was Arista Networks, the low-latency networking switch-maker founded by Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim. Intel never said what it paid for Fulcrum, but the company had raised $102m in venture capital since it was founded, and the price was very likely a multiple of that figure.

Despite the improvements in 10GbE and 40GbE switch chips over the past several years, InfiniBand still has important niches where even lower latency and still higher bandwidth are crucial – the supercomputing racket, for instance, or in database clustering. Just ask Oracle, which uses InfiniBand silicon from Mellanox Technologies in its Exadata database clusters and Exalogic web application server clusters, and which took a 10.2 per cent stake in the chip and switch-maker back in October 2010.”

You can read more about this over at The Register.

Kitguru says: How will AMD answer this move?

Become a Patron!