How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

What I don't get is why tie to such an ancient platform. AMD Milan is my home lab. The new 9004 Epycs are so much better on power efficiency. I'm sure they've done their market research and the gains must be so significant. We used to have a few petabytes and tens of thousands of cores almost ten years ago and it's crazy how much higher data and compute density you can get with modern 30 TiB disks and Epyc 9654s. 100 such nodes and you have 10k cores and really fast data. I can't see myself running a 7003-series datacenter anymore unless the Oxide gains are that big.

They've built this a while ago. A hardware refresh takes time. The good news is that they may be able to upgrade the existing equipment with newer sleds.

Yes we're definitely building the next generation of equipment to fit into the existing racks!

my undestanding is that they had to build not only the entire hardware platform from scratch, but also the software.

in one of his talks Bryan Cantrill talks about how AMD cpus were meant to be booted off a uefi microcode, and AMD themselves told them such... Until they kinda reverse engineered the AGESA thingy and made the cpu boot without bios/uefi.

I guess that's the kind of things that take a lot of time... the first time. In the future they'll likely to be iterating faster.

EDIT: i wrote the comment above to the best of my knowledge, somebody from Oxide might chime in and maybe add some more details :)