How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
oxide.computer
How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
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Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#2I'm amazed Apple don't have a rack mount version of their M series chips yet.
Even for their own internal use in their data centers they'd have to save an absolute boat load on power and cooling given their performance per watt compared to legacy stuff.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#3I'm amazed Apple don't have a rack mount version of their M series chips yet. Even for their own internal use in their data centers they'd have to save an absolute boat load on power and cooling given their performance per watt compared to legacy stuff.
(some of?) their servers do run apple silicon: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#4I'm amazed Apple don't have a rack mount version of their M series chips yet. Even for their own internal use in their data centers they'd have to save an absolute boat load on power and cooling given their performance per watt compared to legacy stuff.
For who? How would this help their core mission?
Maybe it becomes a big enough profit center to matter. Maybe. At the risk of taking focus away, splitting attention from the mission they're on today: building end user systems.
Maybe they build them for themselves. For what upside? Maybe somewhat better compute efficiency maybe, but I think if you have big workloads the huge massive AMD Turin super-chips are going to be incredibly hard to beat.
It's hard to emphasize just how efficient AMD is, with 192 very high performance cores on a 350-500W chip.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#5"If only they used DC from the wall socket, all those H100s would be green" is, not, I think, the hill you want to die on.
But, yeah, my three 18MW/y racks agree that more power efficiency would be nice, it's just that Rewrite It In (Safe) Rust is unlikely to help with that...
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#6I'm amazed Apple don't have a rack mount version of their M series chips yet. Even for their own internal use in their data centers they'd have to save an absolute boat load on power and cooling given their performance per watt compared to legacy stuff.
There is a rack mount version of the Mac Pro you can buy
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#7I'm amazed Apple don't have a rack mount version of their M series chips yet. Even for their own internal use in their data centers they'd have to save an absolute boat load on power and cooling given their performance per watt compared to legacy stuff.
I don't think they'd admit much about it even if they had one internally, both because Apple isn't known for their openness about many things, and because they already exited the dedicated server hardware business years ago, so I think they're likely averse to re-entering it without very strong evidence that it would be beneficial for more than a brief period.
In particular, while I'd enjoy such a device, Apple's whole thing is their whole-system integration and charging a premium because of it, and I'm not sure the markets that want to sell people access to Apple CPUs will pay a premium for a 1U over shoving multiple Mac Minis in the same 1U footprint, especially if they've already been doing that for years at this point...
...I might also speculate that if they did this, they'd have a serious problem, because if they're buying exclusive access to all TSMC's newest fab for extended intervals to meet demand on their existing products, they'd have issues finding sources to meet a potentially substantial demand in people wanting their machines for dense compute. (They could always opt to lag the server platforms behind on a previous fab that's not as competed with, of course, but that feels like self-sabotage if they're already competing with people shoving Mac Minis in a rack, and now the Mac Minis get to be a generation ahead, too?)
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#8I'm amazed Apple don't have a rack mount version of their M series chips yet. Even for their own internal use in their data centers they'd have to save an absolute boat load on power and cooling given their performance per watt compared to legacy stuff.
Oxide is not touching DLC systems in their post even with a 100ft barge pole.
Lenovo's DLC systems use 45 degrees C water to directly cool the power supplies and the servers themselves (water goes through them) for > 97% heat transfer to water. In cooler climates, you can just pump this to your drycoolers, and in winter you can freecool them with just air convection.
Yes, the TDP doesn't go down, but cooling costs and efficiency shots up considerably, reducing POE to 1.03 levels. You can put tremendous amount of compute or GPU power in one rack, and cool them efficiently.
Every chassis handles its own power, but IIRC, all the chassis electricity is DC. and the PSUs are extremely efficient.
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#9"If only they used DC from the wall socket, all those H100s would be green" is, not, I think, the hill you want to die on. But, yeah, my three 18MW/y racks agree that more power efficiency would be nice, it's just that Rewrite It In (Safe) Rust is unlikely to help with that...
> it's just that Rewrite It In (Safe) Rust is unlikely to help with that...
I didn't see any mention of Rust in the article?
Re: How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half
#10What 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.