Chipmaker Intel has acquired QLogic’s InfiniBand in a deal designed to give the former’s networking portfolio a big push. The transaction is for $125 million in cash, and workers who were previously employed by QLogic will hold their current positions under Intel’s reign.

“This is a win-win for QLogic, Intel and our InfiniBand customers and partners,” Chris Humphrey, Vice President of Corporate Marketing, tells us in an interview.  “In addition to purchasing the InfiniBand assets, a significant number of QLogic InfiniBand employees associated with this business are expected to join Intel – meaning the same team members our customers and partners work with every day will continue to support the normal day-to-day running of the InfiniBand business. The divestiture will enable QLogic to provide more focus and greater investment in growth opportunities for the data center with our converged networking, enterprise Ethernet, and storage area networking products.”

Intel’s plans with the new division reach very far into the high-performance computing (HPC) market. The company has a strong vision in place for the future ExaFLOP computing, and hopes to achieve the quintillion computer operations per second benchmark by the time 2018 arrives. It’s easily understandable why QLogic’s unique position in the supercomputer segment made its InfiniBand unit such a good acquisition target.

The latest edition of the Top 500 Supercomputers that went out in December ranked QLogic as one of the bigger fabric vendors. The figures the survey provided also helped to further validate InfiniBand’s leading position in this industry, and subsequently the companies that are offering the technology.

“Intel has been moving aggressively into the switch marketplace, first with the acquisition of Fulcrum Microsystems in 2011 and now with QLogic’s InfiniBand business.”, saysWikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman. “Low latency solutions are critical for high end enterprises and now Intel joins Mellanox as the only suppliers to offer both high speed Ethernet and InfiniBand solutions.”

We covered the previous Intel strategy update only three days ago. As the chipmaker pushes through with its ambitions the core management team has been modified in order to facilitate this pace. Brian Kraznich has been appointed as Intel’s chief operating officer and will assume all the regular internal management duties, while Diane Bryant, the current CIO of the company, has been put in charge of the datacenter group. And in addition to some other staffing changes, Andy Bryant has been selected as the next executive chairman.