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I'm blown away by the work done for Meta's Evenstar team. I loved the talk from XRComm at a OpenCompute Global Summit, in support of adding Evenstar to OCP. (Th

I'm blown away by the work done for Meta's Evenstar team. I loved the talk from XRComm at a OpenCompute Global Summit, in support of adding Evenstar to OCP. (The slides in particular show lots of figures-of-merit that evoked a strong response for me.) https://youtu.be/SXNH3ddpv1k https://youtu.be/SXNH3ddpv1k The hardware looks absurdly economic & performant, crazy modular, and there's amazing changes happening on the software side too with much more being done closer to the edge in converged hardware. It's probably the highest tech (and extremely cost optimized) open source hardware design ever. It looks staggeringly far ahead of commercial offerings. If this doesn't jumpstart massive change, shame on the world. Modular designs for: power amplifier, power supply, digital control board, resonant cavity duplexer filter, signal processing firmwares, heatsink/case. Seeing this land at OCP seems hugely promising.

colechristensen 3y ago
I watched about half of that video and it was too geared towards people who already have context. Could you distill it a bit? What’s going on and why is it cool?
- mderazon 3y ago
  https://engineering.fb.com/2023/06/29/connectivity/evenstar-meta-ocp-open-ran/ https://engineering.fb.com/2023/06/29/connectivity/evenstar-...
- vmfunction 3y ago
  Or just go to OCP site: https://www.opencompute.org/about https://www.opencompute.org/about Looks like something started with Facebook. Sounds wonder if Oxide involved in it?
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    bcantrill has talked a bit about OCP in the past, see these threads: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36558588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36558588 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979117
    - vmfunction 3y ago
      Wow thanks for pointing that out!!! > Facebook's Tioga Pass[1] the innovations in that system are simply not available for any price to the enterprise buyer Seems like OCP may not be as open as appears, when some 'secrete sauce' is behind FB wall. Seems like better to go with Oxide instead of this OCP approach. Disappointing, but not surprising coming from FB or any of FANNG group.
      - p_l 3y ago
        It's not so much an "FB Wall" as much as OCP vendors not willing to engage with small clients. Big clients can leverage their size to acquire supply contracts from ODM's like Quanta that quite often would just ignore smaller companies. Arguably the big innovation of Oxide is providing a turnkey system in the same range that is comparatively easier to buy.
        vmfunction 3y ago
        Thanks for pointing that out. Which makes me think it is better to have Oxide approach instead of something like OCP. It seems to only really benefit large organisations.
        p_l 3y ago
        OCP and Oxide two different but not exclusive approaches. There are vendors providing different levels of integration, including groups that will ship you turneky systems akin to Oxide (or AWS Outpost). Those might depend on OCP Standards to provide higher level of integration than integrating normal HW solutions. Starts at integrating somewhat individual components, going through fill racks, to entire data center standards or designs for Modular Data Centers which you can load onto a truck, deliver to location, hook up and have them working (some might remember Sun containerised datacenter thing, which arguably reminds me of bigger Oxide rack in some ways) Similarly some bits designed for OCP (or hosted by OCP) contribute to wider environment, like OpenBMC, OCP Mezzanine cards
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
I think the concept of OCP is pretty cool, however I struggle to see how it rolls out beyond the hyperscalers of the world. I'm interested in how you could build a business around it.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  If an application only hits the hyper scale, it'll absolutely dominate all computing hardware.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Right now we are deep into the days of cloud. It's hard to imagine people buying servers! So it's definitely hard to see what role OCP might fit into, with that perspective. It also feels somewhat like you have your ask inverted: > I'm interested in how you could build a business around it. Around or on top of? OCP is kind of there to make suppliers job much harder; OCP is here to twist arms of people making hardware. OCP exists to remove special sauce, to stop vendors from trying to get competitive advantage. Anyone making hardware generally is under threat from OCP, as a kind of ruthless buyers cartel who know exactly what they want, and who is happy to buy the specified product from anyone. If you are trying to be further up the stack, OCP is amazing. There's a clear ask, that you and many other buyers are hopefully all asking for. There's systematic design efficiencies throughout; instead of only high end special gear having rack-based power (or mini-me edition: large blade chassis, those chassis requiring tons of extra/expensive metal/backplane), it's just standard, normative design. Higher efficiency and cost-optimizing. Aside from big obvious racks... there's standardized bios/management interfaces that have become vastly more prevalent. OCP nics show up on a very sizable amount of server gear. The buyers have had no real concerted effort to say what it is they want until now, and OCP is a communication/coordination channel for buyers to figure out what they want. It makes the industry better, and the evidence so far has been great, if slow. With any hope, we are shifting back to an age where more people & more companies actually run their own hardware. I personally see really amazing progress from places like Kubernetes as a key enabler, a tenable start towards a data-center OS, where open source services like cloudnativepg can begin to emerge & compete with the expensive well-served SaaS world we've become addicted to (beat back some Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS)).

colechristensen 3y ago

I watched about half of that video and it was too geared towards people who already have context. Could you distill it a bit? What’s going on and why is it cool?

mderazon 3y ago
https://engineering.fb.com/2023/06/29/connectivity/evenstar-meta-ocp-open-ran/ https://engineering.fb.com/2023/06/29/connectivity/evenstar-...
vmfunction 3y ago
Or just go to OCP site: https://www.opencompute.org/about https://www.opencompute.org/about Looks like something started with Facebook. Sounds wonder if Oxide involved in it?
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  bcantrill has talked a bit about OCP in the past, see these threads: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36558588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36558588 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979117
  - vmfunction 3y ago
    Wow thanks for pointing that out!!! > Facebook's Tioga Pass[1] the innovations in that system are simply not available for any price to the enterprise buyer Seems like OCP may not be as open as appears, when some 'secrete sauce' is behind FB wall. Seems like better to go with Oxide instead of this OCP approach. Disappointing, but not surprising coming from FB or any of FANNG group.
    - p_l 3y ago
      It's not so much an "FB Wall" as much as OCP vendors not willing to engage with small clients. Big clients can leverage their size to acquire supply contracts from ODM's like Quanta that quite often would just ignore smaller companies. Arguably the big innovation of Oxide is providing a turnkey system in the same range that is comparatively easier to buy.
      - vmfunction 3y ago
        Thanks for pointing that out. Which makes me think it is better to have Oxide approach instead of something like OCP. It seems to only really benefit large organisations.
        p_l 3y ago
        OCP and Oxide two different but not exclusive approaches. There are vendors providing different levels of integration, including groups that will ship you turneky systems akin to Oxide (or AWS Outpost). Those might depend on OCP Standards to provide higher level of integration than integrating normal HW solutions. Starts at integrating somewhat individual components, going through fill racks, to entire data center standards or designs for Modular Data Centers which you can load onto a truck, deliver to location, hook up and have them working (some might remember Sun containerised datacenter thing, which arguably reminds me of bigger Oxide rack in some ways) Similarly some bits designed for OCP (or hosted by OCP) contribute to wider environment, like OpenBMC, OCP Mezzanine cards

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

I think the concept of OCP is pretty cool, however I struggle to see how it rolls out beyond the hyperscalers of the world. I'm interested in how you could build a business around it.

jvanderbot 3y ago
If an application only hits the hyper scale, it'll absolutely dominate all computing hardware.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Right now we are deep into the days of cloud. It's hard to imagine people buying servers! So it's definitely hard to see what role OCP might fit into, with that perspective. It also feels somewhat like you have your ask inverted: > I'm interested in how you could build a business around it. Around or on top of? OCP is kind of there to make suppliers job much harder; OCP is here to twist arms of people making hardware. OCP exists to remove special sauce, to stop vendors from trying to get competitive advantage. Anyone making hardware generally is under threat from OCP, as a kind of ruthless buyers cartel who know exactly what they want, and who is happy to buy the specified product from anyone. If you are trying to be further up the stack, OCP is amazing. There's a clear ask, that you and many other buyers are hopefully all asking for. There's systematic design efficiencies throughout; instead of only high end special gear having rack-based power (or mini-me edition: large blade chassis, those chassis requiring tons of extra/expensive metal/backplane), it's just standard, normative design. Higher efficiency and cost-optimizing. Aside from big obvious racks... there's standardized bios/management interfaces that have become vastly more prevalent. OCP nics show up on a very sizable amount of server gear. The buyers have had no real concerted effort to say what it is they want until now, and OCP is a communication/coordination channel for buyers to figure out what they want. It makes the industry better, and the evidence so far has been great, if slow. With any hope, we are shifting back to an age where more people & more companies actually run their own hardware. I personally see really amazing progress from places like Kubernetes as a key enabler, a tenable start towards a data-center OS, where open source services like cloudnativepg can begin to emerge & compete with the expensive well-served SaaS world we've become addicted to (beat back some Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS)).