Stanford Seminar - The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as the founders' own explanation of what Oxide is building and why, a frequent link whenever Oxide comes up.
What it is
Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computer Company gives a Stanford EE380 talk on rethinking the server. He argues that hyperscaler-style rack-scale machines with open firmware, RISC-V and Rust should be available to everyone, not just the giants.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends steveklabnik · 2020-06 · on “Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company”
So, I was trying to keep this post short and to the point, but if you want a longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may like [this video] > Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? I think "quality" doesn't really capture 100% of it, but in a sense, yes. The goal is extremely quality, performant, robust servers. I will have to delegate the details to the above talk; I have a bunch of work to get started on, and would just end up re-typing out what it says above, ha!
Recommends steveklabnik · 2020-07 · on “The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [video]”
The sibling comment is good. The problem that we're trying to solve is basically laid out on this slide: [this video] The business is "we will be selling servers." You can't buy any yet, but in the future, you'll be able to. The talk lays out a history of servers, describes the problems with the servers that you can buy from vendors today, and lays out why we think we can build better ones.
Recommends bcantrill · 2020-08 · on “Jensen Huang’s vision for data center dominance may destroy the Arm ecosystem”
For whatever it's worth, the talk I gave at Stanford in February[1] goes into (much) more detail -- and given some of your other comments here, you will find many aspects of the talk educational. [1] [this video]
Recommends bcantrill · 2020-10 · on “Rust After the Honeymoon”
Sorry if that's a bit thin; more detail on what we're doing and why can be found in a (pre-COVID) talk I gave at Stanford[1]. We're definitely not a Deep Stealth company, but we've also been very busy building; expect many more details over the coming year! [1] [this video]
Recommends bcantrill · 2021-03 · on “Compensation as a Reflection of Values”
To take these in order: for what we're doing, I would recommend the talk I gave at Stanford about a year ago.[0] It's a bit dated (and of course we have much much more detail now), but it remains broadly on point. For the parts of Sun that we want to take after: the good bits, of course! ;) There were things that have influenced us with respect to mission, and then also with respect to hardware/software co-design (we are, contrary to the impression you might have, doing a lot of hardware[1]). Lest I sound too rosy about Sun, it had a lot of problems too[2] -- so we're trying not to recreate those! ;) Thank you for the kind words on the podcast -- very much looking forward to getting back in
Recommends panick21_ · 2021-10 · on “Kerla: Monolithic kernel in Rust, aiming for Linux ABI compatibility”
I think its an FPGA with a costume Open-Source Titan chip on it (RISC-V). It is not really a traditional BMC, its more like a service processor that does secure boot and gets you in the OS. It does a few other things but I think they really want it to have minimum functionality. This is a great talk about what they do and why: [this video]
Cites mapgrep · 2020-05 · on “Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?”
Their co founder Bryan Cantrill gave a talk at Stanford on what they are trying to do, essentially offer on prem servers comparable to what “hyperscalers” like Google and Facebook put in their data centers — highly efficient and customizable (in low level software) iirc. [this video]
Cites twic · 2020-06 · on “Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company”
It seems that video has been posted to HN twice, but didn't attract any comments either time, sadly. I don't have the energy to watch a 90 minute talk, but some skipping around finds a bit more detail about what is in the plan: [this video] The theme seems to be giving the operator of the computer a lot more control - eliminating opaque binary blobs, exposing the hardware more directly, etc. I can't tell if this is a particular bee in the founders' bonnets, or a real market demand, or if they know about some scary threat they can't talk about. Whilst this is definitely cool, and something that will get a lot of people on HN super pumped, it doesn't sound like something any company i have worked a