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.
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.