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Expecially with the low volume for the high end Mac Pros they'll have few choices for those with the transition: 1) Either they are going to sell those chips o
by my123 6y ago
Expecially with the low volume for the high end Mac Pros they'll have few choices for those with the transition:
1) Either they are going to sell those chips on the wider market, which probably won't ever happen, or
2) Eat the costs and make the machine unprofitable to retain a market, which isn't too likely either, or
3) Make the machine less expensive and trying to do a high-volume play out of it, or
4) Massively raise the costs.
There's no way out apart from those, which raises questions on what they'll do.
- valuearb 6y ago5) 40 and 50 core versions of the A14 that cost a fraction of Intel Xeon CPUs and offer similar performance.
- imtringued 6y agoThat's just wishful thinking. Mac Pros don't have the sales volumes to ever recover the necessary R&D. Apple is also completely unwilling to sell their chips to competitors. Building a server grade CPU requires a completely different expertise. 99% of the work is in the interconnect, interfaces like DRAM, PCIe. Apple can do all of that except it will take half a decade and only lose the company money. Instead of having such a foolish dream it makes more sense to just find an existing ARM server vendor.
- 1996 6y agoFor 1. and 3., sell the chips to specialized hosting companies who want to try things. Scaleway had a ARM hosting line. There are many innovative and competitive hosting companies in Europe that take advantage of the cheap bandwidth. They won't sneeze at cheaper hardware.
- terandle 6y agoApple already did #4 - massively raise the base cost of the 2019 Mac Pro, so it could be that this is priced in already.
- sjwright 6y ago5) Treat the Mac Pro chips as a line item in their R&D budget for future iPhone and iPad CPUs. 6) Maybe Apple will never build "Mac Pro" class CPU. Instead the Mac Pro ekes out an existence with a higher thermal budget and more GPU/FPGA accelerator cards. (Imagine if Apple released many more FPGA programs for their Afterburner and then let you add two or even four into a Mac?) 7) Use their most powerful chips to build a games console and crush out Nintendo like Sony did to Sega twenty years ago.