As it appears Intel Capital is one of their Series A investors, I wonder if this has some bearing on the chances that there could also be an Intel CPU-based Oxide rack (or maybe individual sleds?) in the future.
It seems that Oxide's product is rather tied to AMD's CPU offerings for the time being (which perhaps will serve them very well for now), and given what they've accomplished so far, I imagine it would take quite a bit of effort on the platform initialization side (and other lower level stuff) to get things working with Intel CPUs instead. Surely the ability to have vendor diversity for many of their components should be an advantage for Oxide (and their customers downstream as well), so maybe there's something to think about there. Of course, this is all interesting only once Intel actually gets competitive again on the datacenter CPU side of things, where they seem to have really dropped the ball in recent years.
On the other hand, their networking switch hardware uses Intel components (Tofino), so maybe that'll be the extent of Intel's integration in their rack for the foreseeable future?
This is interesting as I think Intel have stopped developing Tofino, after buying Barefoot networks back in 2019.
AMD recently purchased Pensando, I'm not sure if their network chips are similar to Tofino but they seem like they are P4 compatible DPUs so they might be a good choice when migrating off of the dead Tofino platform.
So if anything Oxide will be moving further away from Intel!
I would love to work on this kind of stuff, not sure how to get started to end up working somewhere like Oxide..
It seems that Oxide's product is rather tied to AMD's CPU offerings for the time being (which perhaps will serve them very well for now), and given what they've accomplished so far, I imagine it would take quite a bit of effort on the platform initialization side (and other lower level stuff) to get things working with Intel CPUs instead. Surely the ability to have vendor diversity for many of their components should be an advantage for Oxide (and their customers downstream as well), so maybe there's something to think about there. Of course, this is all interesting only once Intel actually gets competitive again on the datacenter CPU side of things, where they seem to have really dropped the ball in recent years.
On the other hand, their networking switch hardware uses Intel components (Tofino), so maybe that'll be the extent of Intel's integration in their rack for the foreseeable future?