I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it lives under the couch.
Their engineered power and cooling solutions are all for rack-scaled hardware, doing a NUC wouldn't make sense. Now a silent and efficiently cooled studio-sized rack with enough hardware (including AMD GPUs) for reasonably quick AI inference with the latest local models, that's something that they could do and be quite popular.
Right, it's the perfect size for a 10" mini rack designed primarily for home labs. Which is the form factor shown on the framework desktop mainboard product page.
10 in. wide mini racks are fine if you have very limited space at your disposal, but it's unclear that Oxide could bring much value there. The 19 in. width is not just for enterprise server equipment, it's in common use at studios that do all sorts of creative media production. That's where there's a really strong case that Oxide's rack-scaled solution (though of course in a reduced-height, custom format) could bring a lot of value, particularly given the recent explosive growth of local AI.
I'm not saying they should put their software stack on a Celeron (or whatever Intel calls their cheap CPUs now). But no racks, please. I just can't get with the "rack in my house" crowd. If you have a basement, then fine I guess. But I live in an apartment, and I don't have the space or patience for a computer that's the size of a mini fridge, and sounds like a jet engine.
Many homelab users are actually building things out in an effort to learn tooling that they will then use at work. Or just out of intellectual interest.
Yeah, a small-scale rack for home would be great to replace the beowulf cluster me and others are still stuck with. I'd probably pay a premium for it, given what I can tell from their product material.
If they can scale down the hardware to something close to homelab-ish in price, would be great marketing and way to build expertise to have their big boy solution promoted at workplaces. Probably not a priority at their stage though.
Hah, that might be slightly above what I'm ready to pay for a at-home server yes :) But given the right specifications and software integration, I'd probably be ready to pony up up to somewhere around 10K for a complete solution if it could replace all my existing hardware, even if it was more expensive than other options with worse tradeoffs.
You have 3-phase service to your house? Lucky. I wish I could get 3-phase here but I think it would require trenching like half a mile to the main road. I get by with a phase converter on my lathe but it's significantly less efficient.