Intel to buy Qlogic's InfiniBand assets for $125 million

Jos

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Intel announced today it has agreed to acquire QLogic's InfiniBand business for $125 million in cash, a move that's designed to enhance the company's networking and scalable high performance computing portfolio. The deal is expected to close by the end of the current quarter pending all regulatory approvals.

InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link for data flow between processors and I/O devices used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. Intel says the acquisition supports their vision of innovating on fabric architectures to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018. An ExaFLOP/s is a quintillion computer operations per second, a hundred times more than today’s fastest supercomputers.

The chipmaker said it expects a "significant number" of InfiniBand employees to join the company. Meanwhile, for QLogic the sale of its InfiniBand assets will help it focus on converged networking, Ethernet and storage area networking (SAN) products, the company said in a statement.

In other Intel news, the company recently offered a sneak peek at the construction of their upcoming Fab 42 in Arizona, due to be completed in 2013. The $5 billion factory will begin making chips with circuits just 14 billionths of a metre, or 14 nanometres, and will be key to reducing their processors' power requirements not only for traditional PCs, but also as it pushes heavily into the smartphone market.

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Does Intel have to build a new factory everytime they go down to a smaller process? Do they continue to use their old fabs? Or later turn them into smaller process fabs? I see a lot of articles about them building fabs, this seems very expensive.

I know nothing about cpu design.
 
they build alot of new fabrics, because it is cheapper to build a new production line for a new die shrink then it is to change the current production lines and maintain the production of the old gen. chips so u dont have to swop and/or change the machines.
 
Does Intel have to build a new factory everytime they go down to a smaller process? Do they continue to use their old fabs? Or later turn them into smaller process fabs? I see a lot of articles about them building fabs, this seems very expensive.

Intel do both. Depends on the plant upgradeability and local infrastructure. Fab 42 is a ground up new build and was planned a few years back. Being able to validate/QA </=14nm without disrupting their older processes. Fab 42 shares the site at Chandler, Arizona with Fab 12 (which makes chipsets on 65nm) and Fab 32 ( which makes CPU on 45 and 32nm). ( Fab's 12 and 32 are due to be upgraded in the near future- presumeably once Fab 42 is up to capacity)

Intel also maintain Fabs at Hillsboro, Oregon ( D1C -32/22nm, D1D -22nm, plus planned Fab D1X -research), Rio Rancho, New Mexico (Fab 11X -32nm), Leixlip, N.Ireland -65 and 90nm CPU and NAND flash), Kiryat Gat, Israel (Fab 28 -45nm moving to 22nm CPU), Dalian, China (65nm chipsets) and Massachusetts.
 
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