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by yencabulator 319 days ago
This is not any different than the "blade" form factor that was popular in the 90s. Shared power and cooling that was not constrained by the height of a 1U rack chassis, with larger fans. Hell, even Supermicro has blade-style chassis with 80mm fans. This is not novel.

It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware etc, with a bespoke OS and management stack.
3 comments
sunshowers 319 days ago
Yes, we're primarily an engineering company, not a research organization.

It's also about what we don't have. We don't have a UEFI, for example, which means we don't have UEFI vulnerabilities.

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yencabulator 319 days ago
Yeah and you're doing good work there. It just kinda annoys me when people go from "oh that's a cool company" into idolatry. 1U servers were always a poor form factor for modern day hot chips & drives. Breaking that mold has been done over and over and isn't something that should be treated as new.

Scaling from the 8U (that blades could already do in the 90s) to full rack as the unit of "slide unit in to connect" DC power and networking is way cooler than using 80mm fans.

Re UEFI: I feel like that part is less about UEFI itself and more about how you have very minimal third party firmware.

I'm pretty excited about openSIL and such in general. If only AMD could execute well in the world of software.

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sunshowers 319 days ago
I can't speak to others' views, but having worked with large-scale bare-metal deployments at Meta, I personally admired Oxide for its clear product vision and rigorous first-principles approach (Rust is a real game-changer!), and applied to work here for that reason.
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throw0101c 319 days ago
> It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware etc, with a bespoke OS and management stack.

Yes, "just".

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jiveturkey 319 days ago
An F1 car is also just plain old engineering, optimized to get around the track quickly, sprinkled with opinions and with a niche bespoke drivetrain. Nothing to see here.
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