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I said before that Apple needs to produce and rent servers that can run high-performance Metal. Maybe the Nuvia guy sees it the same way but could not convince

I said before that Apple needs to produce and rent servers that can run high-performance Metal. Maybe the Nuvia guy sees it the same way but could not convince anyone at Apple of it.

h5ra4ehj5er4 7y ago
"Metal" as in the low-level graphics API? I'm not sure I see the business need, but also, WebGPU spec is in-progress as a higher-level API that would wrap around Metal and Vulkan, imho it would be more practical to launch such a service using the upcoming spec.
ActorNightly 7y ago
Apple doesn't have the tech skill to build anything for high performance. They are a hardware aesthetics company.
- pensatoio 7y ago
  Are you specifically referring to high performance in the context of servers or workstations? My impression has been that Apple is absolutely dominating in the low-power, mobile-first segment with fabrication processes more advanced than all their direct competitors.
  - StillBored 7y ago
    They are just using off the shelf fab space. OTOH, they do a fine job of building a custom core for a specific purpose. That means they can tune and remove functionality they don't need for their particular application set. As someone else mentioned in this thread apparently they don't implement EL2 which is the virtualization layer on armv8. Yet their die sizes a huge and they are targeting a pretty narrow frequency range. So It doesn't really take much to eak out a few 10's of percent here/there to create a product that looks better than a generic core from ARM + a generic OS tuned more for servers (linux) with a JIT'ed GUI. I've seen cases where just pulling compiler flags on an application yield a larger difference than what is seen between top end android and apple phones.
  - ActorNightly 7y ago
    They can do mobile for sure, but even then the chips that they use are not really ahead in performance intrinsically, they are just bigger (and generally more expensive) which naturally gives them better performance. And a lot of the speed improvements comes from just better direct compilation rather than JIT like Android does. For server architecture, Apple has never been competitive. The only reason to get Mac workstations in the past before was that they were more stable than the Windows counterparts, but those days are long gone.
russler23 7y ago
All they have to do is wrap some fabric around their phone core. They should be thanking Williams, not sabotaging his career.

I said before that Apple needs to produce and rent servers that can run high-performance Metal. Maybe the Nuvia guy sees it the same way but could not convince anyone at Apple of it.

h5ra4ehj5er4 7y ago

"Metal" as in the low-level graphics API? I'm not sure I see the business need, but also, WebGPU spec is in-progress as a higher-level API that would wrap around Metal and Vulkan, imho it would be more practical to launch such a service using the upcoming spec.

ActorNightly 7y ago

Apple doesn't have the tech skill to build anything for high performance. They are a hardware aesthetics company.

pensatoio 7y ago
Are you specifically referring to high performance in the context of servers or workstations? My impression has been that Apple is absolutely dominating in the low-power, mobile-first segment with fabrication processes more advanced than all their direct competitors.
- StillBored 7y ago
  They are just using off the shelf fab space. OTOH, they do a fine job of building a custom core for a specific purpose. That means they can tune and remove functionality they don't need for their particular application set. As someone else mentioned in this thread apparently they don't implement EL2 which is the virtualization layer on armv8. Yet their die sizes a huge and they are targeting a pretty narrow frequency range. So It doesn't really take much to eak out a few 10's of percent here/there to create a product that looks better than a generic core from ARM + a generic OS tuned more for servers (linux) with a JIT'ed GUI. I've seen cases where just pulling compiler flags on an application yield a larger difference than what is seen between top end android and apple phones.
- ActorNightly 7y ago
  They can do mobile for sure, but even then the chips that they use are not really ahead in performance intrinsically, they are just bigger (and generally more expensive) which naturally gives them better performance. And a lot of the speed improvements comes from just better direct compilation rather than JIT like Android does. For server architecture, Apple has never been competitive. The only reason to get Mac workstations in the past before was that they were more stable than the Windows counterparts, but those days are long gone.

russler23 7y ago

All they have to do is wrap some fabric around their phone core. They should be thanking Williams, not sabotaging his career.