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That'd be an awesome extension of the resources they invested, but it runs the risk of designs serving too many masters (like the F35 Joint Strike Fighter tryin

by npunt 11y ago

That'd be an awesome extension of the resources they invested, but it runs the risk of designs serving too many masters (like the F35 Joint Strike Fighter trying to add VTOL, making the non-VTOL thing way too heavy), and the A-series probably doesn't have enough cores for the unit price to work well for these services. What Intel is doing with Xeon Phi and the 18-core Xeons is the way things are going I think.

protomyth 11y ago
I think they could handle a separate line of chips. Plus, a lot of folks are going the ARM route in server-land.
ryao 11y ago
If their A-series chips have protected internal data paths and ECC, they could build microservers around them. The A9 already has PCI-E lanes that could be used for networking and storage.
rdancer 11y ago
If for every F35 they made three of each, with different capabilities, and ceremonially dumped the two without the desired capabilities out in the ocean, it would still be cheaper overall. Which is hopefully what Apple would do. It's not like they lack talent or organizational ability to employ a few more chip designers. Or a few dozen.
acdha 11y ago
The A9 does have respectable performance and great thermal characteristics. Rather than compete head to head with Intel, who are very very good a general purpose CPUs, it'd be interesting to see a cloud-optimized “server” which is actually a 1U cluster of storage processors – tweaked A9, as much flash as they can fit, etc. – so you'd have capacity to do things like encrypt everything at rest and in transit and apply distributed database techniques to everything because you'd have a relatively huge amount of processing capacity very close to each block of storage and they control the entire software stack. Basically like what Oracle does with Exadata without fitting a yacht into the purchase price.

by npunt 11y ago

protomyth 11y ago

I think they could handle a separate line of chips. Plus, a lot of folks are going the ARM route in server-land.

ryao 11y ago

If their A-series chips have protected internal data paths and ECC, they could build microservers around them. The A9 already has PCI-E lanes that could be used for networking and storage.

rdancer 11y ago

If for every F35 they made three of each, with different capabilities, and ceremonially dumped the two without the desired capabilities out in the ocean, it would still be cheaper overall. Which is hopefully what Apple would do. It's not like they lack talent or organizational ability to employ a few more chip designers. Or a few dozen.

acdha 11y ago

The A9 does have respectable performance and great thermal characteristics. Rather than compete head to head with Intel, who are very very good a general purpose CPUs, it'd be interesting to see a cloud-optimized “server” which is actually a 1U cluster of storage processors – tweaked A9, as much flash as they can fit, etc. – so you'd have capacity to do things like encrypt everything at rest and in transit and apply distributed database techniques to everything because you'd have a relatively huge amount of processing capacity very close to each block of storage and they control the entire software stack. Basically like what Oracle does with Exadata without fitting a yacht into the purchase price.