Open Compute Project: An Interview with Intel's Rebecca Weekly | Hacker News Reader

Open Compute Project: An Interview with Intel's Rebecca Weekly

anandtech.com

52 pointsrbanffy25 comments

As hinted at in the article, the 'OCP rack' spec was narrowly specified to address a specific problem facebook had, and by being gratuitously incompatible with standard 19" racks they really hindered adoption of OCP gear outside of hyperscalers that were able and willing to go all-in on OCP.

Hopefully the new Open-19 thing that is now part of OCP can rectify this mistake.

OCP includes plenty of 19" equipment such as Microsoft's OCS and has for years. There's probably more 19" gear than 21" in OCP now.

And there are also a lot of OCP specs for components that don't care whether they're in a 19" or 21" system. Their specs for NICs and SSDs are relevant regardless of the rack size.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out the modern relevance of the OCP mission ten years on - lost me at the chiplet discussion. The nonstandard racks seemed to indicate the organization would be a dog-wagging tail, but it's unclear how much that's happened either.

What exactly is the point of Open-19? Seems like yet-another type of blade enclosure, since you loose access to the back of the nodes, you loose a lot of flexibility for IO.

Anybody else feeling a bit weird at how her (massive) picture is the first thing in the page, as opposed to a picture about the project itself? And anybody else feeling that this is only the case because she looks good, almost if her looks was more important than her hard-earned Senior Principal Engineer position?

If you click through to the interview topic [0], it lists another article [1] with exactly the same format of a large profile shot pre-article. Makes sense to me - it follows the usual style of interviews having a photo of the interviewee front and centre, and after all they're interviewing a person not a rack of servers.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/tag/interviews

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...

Of course the top post is misogynistic bullshit accusing her of getting special treatment for her looks, even though the idea is easily disproven by checking out the other ‘interview” style article on the site, which is two click away and also features a large photo of the subject.

It starts with questions about the photo, and the next guy piles on and characterizes the interview as “political, not technical”, because, apparently interviews that require footnotes explaining that “an average PUE is 1.4-2.0, bad PUE is 2.5+“ are just too fluffy for real nerds.

(As to the size, which someone invokes to save this accusation, below: both are scaled to the width of the content, only one happens to be landscape while the other is in what’s literally called “portrait” format)

Sorry but I wasn’t trying to say that she’s getting special treatment. That’s not what I said or what I meant. And I’m sorry that my comment was perceived as misogynistic, the spirit was quite the opposite.

So what was your point in posting the original post? You post seems to be just a comment on the page layout and speculation about it based on her appearance.

Its almost certainly a company stock photo of her.

The page layout is bad, (she's looking off the page, which makes it awkward) but its the tech news web (moving ads, almost unreadable without reader view...).

This is a really good discussion to be had. There is an argument to be made about putting traditionally underrepresented groups of people front and center in articles like this, but it all depends on if she requested(or was explicitly in agreement with) this / chose the picture herself, or if other interviews on the same site do the same thing with male engineers IMO.

Definitely agree that >"almost if her looks was more important than her hard-earned Senior Principal Engineer position" seems to be a real problem for many women in the industry, and I really hope we can overcome this soon.

Definitely, I know nothing of the origin of the picture.

I have a daughter that I am hoping will get excited about STEM. I am, as I think everybody should be, very much in favor of increasing the representation of underrepresented groups of people. But this just seems like an odd editorial choice.

For comparison: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-... this is the picture size of a male interviewee. It's less than half the size of the other one.

> It's less than half the size of the other one.

It's the same width. The site always shows the cover image at the full width of the article. If that image doesn't have a fairly wide aspect ratio, then it pushes the article text relatively further down.

That is a photo off what looks like a laptop camera though, if it were the same size it'd look awful. Point taken though

Yeah I'm completely with you that this is a really odd choice. Just wanted to think about an alternate reason why they could've made that choice but your initial assessment seems way more likely, sadly.

I'm guessing the photo came from Intel, can't see many interviews being done in person right now.

There was a similar presentation for another recent interview [1] with an Intel person.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16608/intels-full-enterprise-...

It was indeed done remote, you can watch/listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlB6tsLiY0w

The interview is also more about pictures (what intel wants you to see) than about reality. A lot of political talk without substance. The only thing i got that they want to have a sort of vendor agnostic datacenter.

it is just another country club style board, countless in the industry, for VPs to fill their calendar and to mingle/network. Tech wise - Intel is like those generals fighting the last war while the world is moving forward. It is a very strong contrast with the NVidia presentation of their new architecture with that Grace CPU, etc. - this is what near future looks like.

No, it's an interview first man not a whitepaper.

> Anybody else feeling a bit weird at how her (massive) picture is the first thing in the page, as opposed to a picture about the project itself?

No. Despite the value of "on the Internet, nobody knows you're (a dog|not wearing pants)", it's unfortunately become fairly common for even things that aren't about people to focus on pictures of people.

> And anybody else feeling that this is only the case because she looks good, almost if her looks was more important than her hard-earned Senior Principal Engineer position?

No, because I haven't been living under a rock and I've noticed that pictures of people are standard practice these days even for tech-related things.

https://www.opencompute.org/blog/introducing-ocp-20

> Optics: Lead in defining market requirements for process and technology transitions for optimal convergence

Does this mean that in a couple years the half-dozen different parameters for fiber network stuff will be standardized enough for no-thought-required home use like RJ-45 / CAT6 wired ethernet is today?

Optical connectivity for short reach (distance) is pretty well standardized and has been for years at least at 1G and above. The biggest barrier for a home user would be familiarizing oneself with the fact you can’t bend fibers like you can copper and you have to keep connectors clean. Other than that you should be able to connect and go.

No, this will never happen. Longer reach is more expensive but the industry won't pay the highest prices for everything if they don't need to.

Well, OM3/4 on MPO is a common thing, as is OS2 on dual-LC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com