Stanford Seminar - The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer

So, I was trying to keep this post short and to the point, but if you want a longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may like [VIDEO] > Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? I think "quality" doesn't really capture 100% of it, but in a sense, yes. The goal is extremely quality, performant, robust servers. I will have to delegate the details to the above talk; I have a bunch of work to get started on, and would just end up re-typing out what it says above, ha!

The sibling comment is good. The problem that we're trying to solve is basically laid out on this slide: [VIDEO] The business is "we will be selling servers." You can't buy any yet, but in the future, you'll be able to. The talk lays out a history of servers, describes the problems with the servers that you can buy from vendors today, and lays out why we think we can build better ones.

For whatever it's worth, the talk I gave at Stanford in February[1] goes into (much) more detail -- and given some of your other comments here, you will find many aspects of the talk educational. [1] [VIDEO]

Sorry if that's a bit thin; more detail on what we're doing and why can be found in a (pre-COVID) talk I gave at Stanford[1]. We're definitely not a Deep Stealth company, but we've also been very busy building; expect many more details over the coming year! [1] [VIDEO]

To take these in order: for what we're doing, I would recommend the talk I gave at Stanford about a year ago.[0] It's a bit dated (and of course we have much much more detail now), but it remains broadly on point. For the parts of Sun that we want to take after: the good bits, of course! ;) There were things that have influenced us with respect to mission, and then also with respect to hardware/software co-design (we are, contrary to the impression you might have, doing a lot of hardware[1]). Lest I sound too rosy about Sun, it had a lot of problems too[2] -- so we're trying not to recreate those! ;) Thank you for the kind words on the podcast -- very much looking forward to getting back in the garage and recording some new episodes! Finally, on Spring: yes, I need to find it (we just moved) and then find a CD-ROM drive (feels easier) and then I'll get it uploaded! [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]

I think its an FPGA with a costume Open-Source Titan chip on it (RISC-V). It is not really a traditional BMC, its more like a service processor that does secure boot and gets you in the OS. It does a few other things but I think they really want it to have minimum functionality. This is a great talk about what they do and why: [VIDEO]

Their co founder Bryan Cantrill gave a talk at Stanford on what they are trying to do, essentially offer on prem servers comparable to what “hyperscalers” like Google and Facebook put in their data centers — highly efficient and customizable (in low level software) iirc. [VIDEO]

It seems that video has been posted to HN twice, but didn't attract any comments either time, sadly. I don't have the energy to watch a 90 minute talk, but some skipping around finds a bit more detail about what is in the plan: [VIDEO] The theme seems to be giving the operator of the computer a lot more control - eliminating opaque binary blobs, exposing the hardware more directly, etc. I can't tell if this is a particular bee in the founders' bonnets, or a real market demand, or if they know about some scary threat they can't talk about. Whilst this is definitely cool, and something that will get a lot of people on HN super pumped, it doesn't sound like something any company i have worked at would really care about. Unless these machines also deliver significantly better performance. But then, those companies were not hyperscalers.