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0 pointsvonneumannstan7mo ago0 comments

Skeptical of that. There's only so much you can do against the physics of moving electrons around at high speeds... "Bigger Fans" and "compute density" doesn't change that

0 comments

sunshowers7mo ago

Commodity hardware doesn't quite tend to operate at a compute vs efficiency Pareto frontier — there's a lot of wasted energy that we've been able to optimize with our vertical integration. (I work at Oxide.)

pmichaud7mo ago

I don't have any particular knowledge about oxide's cooling, but think about how bloated and inefficient literally every part of the compute stack is from metal to seeing these words on a screen. If you imagine fixing every part of it to be efficient top to bottom, I think you'll agree that we're not even in the same galaxy as the physical limitations of moving electrons around at high speeds.

kortilla7mo ago

But the majority of heat is going to come from the CPU and this is a product to run arbitrary customer workloads.

If the customers leave these things idle, then oxide is going to shine. But a busy rack is going to be dominated by CPU heat.

throw0101c7mo ago

According to Oxide Computer, they found that going from 20mm to 80mm fans dropped their chassis power usage (efficiency is to the cube of the radius): a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans, and they were able to get down to 1.2%:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q

From their weblog post:

> Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide is able to fill our specialized racks with 32 AMD Milan sleds and highly-available network switches using less than 15kW per rack, doubling the compute density in a typical data center. With just 16 of the alternative 1U servers and equivalent network switches, over 16kW of power is required per rack, leading to only 1,024 CPU cores vs Oxide’s 2,048.

* https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power...

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zozbot2347mo ago

Their rack scale from-scratch redesign includes fans big enough that they've reportedly managed to cool CPU hardware that was actually designed for water-cooling, with no expectation for air cooling (though admittedly, they say they only achieved this just barely, and with a LOT of noise). That seems like something that's going to be objectively verifiable as a step up in efficiency.

capital_guy7mo ago

I believe the fans are actually smaller. The rack is definitely quieter than other racks, but he says in the rear rack tour that it's quite hot. Check out these videos of it

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHbgjB0RQ1s [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJmw9OICH-4

steveklabnik7mo ago

The fans are 80mm, traditionally 1U is roughly half that size.

naikrovek7mo ago

maybe you're not familiar with just how stupidly written most code is.

you're right that there are efficiency limits, but not once in my career have I ever seen anyone even attempt to write their code so that it is efficient to run, outside of gaming.

menaerus7mo ago

Anything can be improved. Or almost anything. The question is by how much, 5%, 10% or 300%. In this case, I am not really I understand the problem oxide is set to solve so I can't really comment precisely but to me it sounds that if we generally say that data center equipment is suffering from power budget and cooling issues then I don't see this as a problem that software can solve.

steveklabnik7mo ago

> I don't see this as a problem that software can solve.

Neither do we, which is why we are building both software and hardware, together. That's the only way to truly tackle thorny issues like these.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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sunshowers7mo ago

pmichaud7mo ago

kortilla7mo ago

But the majority of heat is going to come from the CPU and this is a product to run arbitrary customer workloads.

If the customers leave these things idle, then oxide is going to shine. But a busy rack is going to be dominated by CPU heat.

throw0101c7mo ago

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q

From their weblog post:

* https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power...

2 more replies

zozbot2347mo ago

capital_guy7mo ago

I believe the fans are actually smaller. The rack is definitely quieter than other racks, but he says in the rear rack tour that it's quite hot. Check out these videos of it

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHbgjB0RQ1s [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJmw9OICH-4

steveklabnik7mo ago

The fans are 80mm, traditionally 1U is roughly half that size.

naikrovek7mo ago

maybe you're not familiar with just how stupidly written most code is.

you're right that there are efficiency limits, but not once in my career have I ever seen anyone even attempt to write their code so that it is efficient to run, outside of gaming.

menaerus7mo ago

steveklabnik7mo ago

> I don't see this as a problem that software can solve.

Neither do we, which is why we are building both software and hardware, together. That's the only way to truly tackle thorny issues like these.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse