Weird there’s no mention of GPU at all when you’d think that’s what would prick up the ears of the hosting companies ….. stack a pile of GPUs in a rack, surely you can sell time on that.
Oxide's goal is that they, and by extension their customers, have as much visibility and control over the software stack in these racks as possible, and that includes firmware. They started developing these systems before the current wave of interest in machine learning led by ChatGPU and Stable Diffusion really got underway.
Nvidia GPU drivers are very proprietary, which means that admins and developers have limited visibility into them if they misbehave in any way. This goes against Oxide's philosophy of full visibility into a system that you purchase.
Nvidia's CUDA software has a significant lead ahead of AMD and Intel GPUs, and they're not going to open source it any time soon. But this is a rapidly changing landscape, and AMD and Intel and others are pouring an enormous amount of research into getting their hardware and software to match what Nvidia has going. Nvidia is in pole position, but they're not guaranteed to stay there.
There's still a large market for the CPU workloads that Oxide is offering. For now, Oxide will be concentrating on meeting this traditional compute demand. But you're right to point out that in 2023, the absence of a top tier GPU in these racks is noticeable. I suspect Oxide will want to include some form of GPU or TPU into the next version of their system, but they won't just grab whatever hardware happens to be in fashion. It needs to work with their system as a whole.
I don't think they're trying to be AWS. They're trying to sell a product that greatly simplifies doing on-site cloud for companies. So they sell the physical hardware/software bundle and not time.
> “Oxide is a strong believer in the need for open-source software at the lowest layers of the stack -- including silicon initialization and platform enablement. With the availability of AMD openSIL, AMD is showing that they share this vision. We believe that the ultimate beneficiaries of open-source silicon initialization -- as it has been for open-source revolutions elsewhere in the stack -- will be customers and end-users, and we applaud AMD for taking this important and inspiring step!”
Now to see how their development timeframes and synchronization efforts with big hardware companies go.
This is where they will enter the real “hard” part of hardware, with an exec team from software. Can they respond to the market while making hardware?
They seem to have presented as generally thoughtful about their approach. If they can release major variants about annually or even sub-annually that is what I think will enable them to win.
The Oxide machines seem to be aimed at 2020.