Stanford Seminar - The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer
What it is
Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computer Company gives a Stanford EE380 talk on rethinking the server. He argues that hyperscaler-style rack-scale machines with open firmware, RISC-V and Rust should be available to everyone, not just the giants.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as the founders' own explanation of what Oxide is building and why, a frequent link whenever Oxide comes up.
- 3 people recommended it
- 6 different months
- 0 strong recommendations
- first 2020, last 2025
What HN commenters said
“if you want a longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may like”
Longer description of Oxide's goals from a founder
steveklabnik, 2020-06 · Recommendation · in “Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company”
“you will find many aspects of the talk educational”
More detail on Oxide's approach, educational
bcantrill, 2020-08 · Recommendation · in “Jensen Huang’s vision for data center dominance may destroy the Arm ecosystem”
“This is a great talk about what they do and why”
Great talk on what Oxide does and why
panick21_, 2021-10 · Recommendation · in “Kerla: Monolithic kernel in Rust, aiming for Linux ABI compatibility”
Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.
Topics: oxide computer, bryan cantrill, servers, open firmware, rust, datacenter
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