Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (NASDAQ: MRVL) today announced the completion of its acquisition of Cavium, Inc. The combination creates a leading semiconductor company focused on the infrastructure market, offering customers a portfolio of storage, processing, networking, wireless connectivity and security products whose breadth and depth are unmatched in the industry.

"The next wave of semiconductor growth will be fueled by advancements in the data economy," said Matt Murphy, Marvell's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Applications such as AI, 5G, Cloud, automotive, and edge computing all require engineering solutions that combine high bandwidth, very low power consumption, and leadership in complex system on a chip solutions. As a combined company, we now offer industry-leading IP, a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions, and a talented team of innovators ready to tackle our customers' toughest challenges. We're excited to get started."

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers, graphics and gaming platforms with a broad portfolio of workstation products, and Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced the availability of ThunderXStation: the industry's first 64-bit Armv8 workstation platform based on Cavium's flagship ThunderX2 processor.

Workstations are standalone platforms with high performance CPUs, lots of memory and excellent graphics capabilities, widely used for advanced software development. ThunderXStation integrates dual socket ThunderX2 motherboard in a 4U tower suitable for office environments. Arm has a very strong ecosystem with millions of developers and is the processor of choice for a variety of verticals such as mobile, embedded and IoT. Arm software developers currently utilize binary translators and cross compilers resulting in increased development and debug cycles. By delivering native performance and eliminating the need for cross compilers, ThunderXStation simplifies software development for Arm and significantly improves time to solution delivery.

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and Cavium, Inc. today announced a definitive agreement, unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, under which Marvell will acquire all outstanding shares of Cavium common stock in exchange for consideration of $40.00 per share in cash and 2.1757 Marvell common shares for each Cavium share. Upon completion of the transaction, Marvell will become a leader in infrastructure solutions with approximately $3.4 billion in annual revenue.

The transaction combines Marvell's portfolio of leading HDD and SSD storage controllers, networking solutions and high-performance wireless connectivity products with Cavium's portfolio of leading multi-core processing, networking communications, storage connectivity and security solutions. The combined product portfolios provide the scale and breadth to deliver comprehensive end-to-end solutions for customers across the cloud data center, enterprise and service provider markets, and expands Marvell's serviceable addressable market to more than $16 billion. This transaction also creates an R&D innovation engine to accelerate product development, positioning the company to meet today's massive and growing demand for data storage, heterogeneous computing and high-speed connectivity.

GIGABYTE Technology, a leading producer of high-performance server hardware, and Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced production availability of GIGABYTE's Arm server platforms, based on ThunderX2 SoC product family.

GIGABYTE, with its award-winning product portfolio, has long been recognized in the industry as a leader in design and innovation. With a broad offering of commercially-available Arm-based server solutions, GIGABYTE continues to demonstrate engineering expertise in system-level integration. Through its world-wide presence, GIGABYTE is uniquely positioned to accelerate the adoption and deployment of ThunderX2-based systems into the cloud and hyperscale data center applications.

Stocks of both Marvell and Cavium rallied over the weekend as reports emerged of Marvell entering talks to acquire the network equipment SoC giant. Cavium specializes in network infrastructure equipment SoCs, such as the famed ThunderX processor, while Marvell holds IP in networking and storage. There are no details as to the value of the acquisition. Shares of Marvell rose 5 percent, and those of Cavium by a staggering 17 percent, as reports of the deal emerged. Tech stocks could rally big on Monday, if Marvell and Cavium close the deal, and Broadcom inches closer to close its $100 billion bid to acquire Qualcomm.

Microsoft is looking to reduce costs in its Azure cloud computing platforms for tasks like search, storage, machine learning and big data. And after having developed a version of Windows for servers that use ARM processors, in a joint work with Qualcomm and Cavium, Microsoft seems to also be looking forward to leave its dependency on Intel products as nothing but a memory. Microsoft's ARM server design, dubbed Project Olympus, looks to hardware innovations so as to reduce costs, boosting competitiveness and flexibility in regards to other big players in the cloud space, like Amazon and Alphabet. That the design is open source is also a boon to other businesses and Microsoft partners.


Though the design isn't "deployed into production yet (...) that is the next logical step," said Jason Zander, vice president of Microsoft's Azure cloud division. "This is a significant commitment on behalf of Microsoft. We wouldn't even bring something (...) if we didn't think this was a committed project and something that's part of our roadmap."

A group of leading technology companies today announced the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today's bottlenecks. The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK hynix, Western Digital Corporation, and Xilinx.

Modern computer systems have been built around the assumption that storage is slow, persistent and reliable, while data in memory is fast but volatile. As new storage class memory technologies emerge that drive the convergence of storage and memory attributes, the programmatic and architectural assumptions that have worked in the past are no longer optimal. The challenges associated with explosive data growth, real-time application demands, the emergence of low latency storage class memory, and demand for rack scale resource pools require a new approach to data access.

GIGABYTE Technology, a leading creator of high performance server hardware, and Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver workload optimized server platforms based on Cavium's 64-bit ARMv8 ThunderX product family.

GIGABYTE's award winning product portfolio has been long recognized in the industry as a leader in design and innovation. With a broad offering of volume server platforms GIGABYTE has demonstrated engineering expertise in areas of system level integration of compute with I/O, large memory configurations and power optimization. With a world-wide presence GIGABYTE is uniquely positioned to accelerate the delivery and deployment of ThunderX based systems into cloud and data center.

Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced the introduction of a new game changing category of processors that are workload optimized for a range of applications in the cloud and data center. The 2.5GHz 48 core ThunderX is the world's highest performing low-power 64-bit ARMv8 SoC family of workload optimized processors with a range of SKUs and form factors for high performance volume compute, storage, secure compute and networking specific workloads.

Data center infrastructure transformation is one of the key trends driving IT spending in 2014 and beyond. Analysts predict that the global data center infrastructure market, including servers, storage, networking, security and virtualization, will reach $128 billion in 2014. Key trends driving this disruption include rapid adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) enabled by Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) with virtualized on demand compute, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Storage (SDS). The continued growth and adoption of Open Source Software with almost 100 billion lines of code and nearly 10 million active developers is also radically changing installed base software requirements.