Hardware Podcasts

Bringing up Cosmo

Oxide and Friends · 24 Apr 2025 · 1h 55m · Episode 14

What this episode covers

Nathanael Huffman, Matt Keeter, Ian Sobering, and Aaron Hartwig of Oxide Computer Company detail the bring-up of their next-generation Cosmo server sled, contrasting it with the painful Gimlet launch. The team leveraged a custom test board called Grapefruit to risk-retire FPGA logic and firmware before tape-out, enabling a remarkably smooth initial power-on. However, they encountered critical debugging challenges, including a blown FPGA pin due to a bus contention error and a subtle FPGA toolchain bug involving an undriven reset pin that prevented the AMD Turin CPU from exiting reset.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Products
Cosmo, Gimlet, Grapefruit, Ruby, Minibar, Hubris, Humility
Chips
AMD Turin, AMD Milan, Lattice iCE40, Xilinx Spartan 7, LPC55, STM32
Tools
Altium, Cadence, OrCAD, Vivado

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The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by Oxide and Friends. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.