I want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware.
Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show.
I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over the years, only to be stun locked by the application process. Not because it's a bad process, but because I feel I'm not up to par as an engineer. Maybe one day I'll go through with it.
I'm pretty sure I'm not talented enough for Oxide, but just asking myself the application questions has been a fun exercise. I'm not in love with their problem space, but I am really into the way they work and do business.
Greatest hope: their approach catches on outside just Oxide, and I get to work somewhere with a similar ethos and practises one day.
Greatest fear: the way they work only makes sense for the most elite and well-capitalised of companies.
Many years ago, I quit the technology industry because I thought a company like Oxide could never exist. I want to work for them but I'm not sure I'm qualified. Maybe one day I'll apply.
Oxide is the only company I can think of that carries the torch of what silicon valley used to be in the 90s. Actual, awesome, cool technology! I wish massive success to Oxide.
This design feels very obvious-in-hindsight. Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why?
Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
Cool tour.
I haven't kept up with their developments; what kind of workloads have they been pushing for? Since they don't seem to have any specialized accelerators in the Compute Sled, I am assuming they are not targeting AI workloads for now?
Curious how robust the (what looks like PCIe edge connector slots) connection to the drives is in practice. Obviously converting from the horizontal mainboard to a vertical drive requires such a connection, making it a plug-in card at least allows for replacing the card if it breaks/wears/etc, and mounting the front of the adapter card to a bulkhead should prevent much shifting of the card in the slot. Neat design and reuse of a cheap high speed connector.
How easy is it to swap the fan bar out for a failed fan? It looks like a single unit holding all the fans. Can the sled be pulled but retained in the rack and then fan bars removed and reinstalled without fully removing the sled and without tools?
I don’t think there’s a GPU component so it’s probably a much lower power profile. Also, per this cloudflare write up the Turin gen of the AMD Epycs is very efficient: https://blog.cloudflare.com/gen13-launch/
big fan of oxide, and love the demo overall, but at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that these kinds of 3D demos are a bit gimmicky/cheap nowadays. pages like this used to be a signal for a high-end product and or a benchmark for good engineering. now though, we all know that this kind of work can be vibe-coded with threejs fairly quickly if you have the assets. idk ... it feels like it's trying to capture my attention through flashing lights instead of letting the work stand on its own
I don't want to subtract from the demo too much, b/c I do love oxide, but I do see this as a trend that more people will use to garner attention until it's too overdone - at which point, 3D will revert to being used for more practical use-cases
Oxide hitting stride just in time for the memory crisis. I hope they can sustain because they have the coolest stuff, and the podcast is great.
I guess the world of atoms is still hard enough that you can publish an interactive spec of your product and not have to worry about it being immediately copied.
Very instructive on how a computer rack works. I cought only later on that it was Oxide specific, but the design decisions seem so obvious to me that they look like industry standards. What about firmware architecture ? How do you design for reliability ? And how often does an infra like that stop working bc of a hardware problem ? And firmware ?
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 67.8 ms ] threadNot to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show.
I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over the years, only to be stun locked by the application process. Not because it's a bad process, but because I feel I'm not up to par as an engineer. Maybe one day I'll go through with it.
Greatest hope: their approach catches on outside just Oxide, and I get to work somewhere with a similar ethos and practises one day.
Greatest fear: the way they work only makes sense for the most elite and well-capitalised of companies.
it's bring a new mentality of owning instead of renting.
however - I feel like the industry is what's letting them down.
had posted this earlier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687341 - on whether Multi-core is dead.
because these racks - it means - you've to embrace putting the hardware to work. which I don't think the industry is willing to do or able to.
Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer
I don't want to subtract from the demo too much, b/c I do love oxide, but I do see this as a trend that more people will use to garner attention until it's too overdone - at which point, 3D will revert to being used for more practical use-cases
EDIT: typos
I guess the world of atoms is still hard enough that you can publish an interactive spec of your product and not have to worry about it being immediately copied.
Isn't it decommissioned?