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Intel still has plenty of margin to buy the market with, and their own fabs. They can keep a good portion of the server market until someone makes the cost to s
by gpapilion 6y ago
Intel still has plenty of margin to buy the market with, and their own fabs. They can keep a good portion of the server market until someone makes the cost to switch low enough to be attractive.
That said, I think they blew it the the cellphone market, and now this has haunted them. They aren’t competitive in the broader market, and more the cost to switch from arm there is high. AMD I think is a near term issue in the server market, but ARM is the real issue.
- smallnamespace 6y agoIntel’s previous acquisitions have been pretty bad. It doesn’t matter how deep your pockets are if you’re unable to successfully integrate or manage what you buy, and this speaks to management/organizational dysfunction, which money also doesn’t easily fix.
- _ph_ 6y agoIn general, the elephant in the room is: what if Apple outperforms both Intel and AMD with their Apple Silicon? ARM is an efficient architecture and the have a process node advantage for 2021. If they wanted, they probably could make very convincing server CPUs. If they want to move as announced the Mac Pro to arm, they would need server class CPUs anyway
- wmf 6y agoWhat happened when Apple outperformed Intel and AMD with PowerPC? People kept buying Windows PCs. What if Apple outperforms both Intel and AMD with their Apple Silicon? People will keep buying Windows and ChromeOS PCs. AWS is testing the server market right now with Graviton2, basically a drop-in replacement for x86 that's faster and cheaper. It's going to be fascinating to watch and I hope AWS reports architecture usage share over time.
- snapetom 6y agoApple didn't make PowerPC chips. That's a huge difference. First, Apple wasn't a supplier. If Silicon takes off, they could become a supplier. Second, the reason they're switching to Silicon is the same reason they switched from IBM to Intel - the chip suppliers didn't react to the changing consumer landscape. By making consumer devices, Apple is much more in tune with that landscape than IBM/Intel is. They can adapt chips much better and won't be handcuffed by chip suppliers in the future.
- spideymans 6y agoMoving to their own chips also allows for much more aggressive pricing.
- tpetry 6y agoIs graviton2 really faster? I dont remember the exact details but didnt they still have a (long) way until reaching intel/amd performance? If i remember correctly they are currently only interesting because of their price.
- pantalaimon 6y ago> Is graviton2 really faster? No https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-graviton2&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-...
- philliphaydon 6y agoFrom running my asp .net core api on Intel vs Graviton 2, graviton turned out to be roughly 15% faster. But the SSR of vue turned out to be roughly 10% slower.
- _ph_ 6y agoThat is almost 20 years past, many things have changed. Most importantly, the iPhone has happened. I am not claiming, that Apple completely takes over the PC market, just that the market share could considerably rise. Having the better processors and iPhone compatibility could do the trick.
- webmobdev 6y ago> what if Apple outperforms both Intel and AMD with their Apple Silicon? It wouldn't matter at all to either AMD or Intel until Apple starts supplying these chips to other OEM's. Till then, it will just be used in the walled garden of Apple products, which is the very thing that makes it very unattractive for many users.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoI suspect it’s mostly price that makes it unattractive to users. Worrying about the walled garden is a fringe concern.
- amluto 6y agoThis depends on the use case. For phones and consumer applications, the walled garden is often tolerable. But imagine trying to run a cloud service, a FinTech system, a factory, an ERP system, etc in the walled garden.
- _ph_ 6y agoThe Mac isn't a walled garden, why should servers with Apple Silicon be?
- Dahoon 6y agoNot as long as Windows is not a default OS.
- ajuc 6y agoThey have almost 0 computer market share in developing markets, nobody knows how to use apple, nobody knows their stack and their programming languages, all the infrastructure is built around windows. With smartphones it's not such big a problem cause you don't do anything productive on smartphones anyway. With PC/laptops it's a big disadvantage I don't see changing in a few years just because of small performance advantages, even if the prices weren't an issue.
- webmaven 6y ago
- baskire 6y agoThe arm MacBooks will mean developing ARM code for your server is easier than x86. I highly suspect we’ll see a switch from intel to arm in the server space in next 5-10 years. The cloud vendors have so much to gain by building their own arm chips.
- danieldk 6y agoI wonder whether Intel/AMD will start offering x86_64 licensing if AArch64 takes off on servers in a major way. You'd think that they would prefer to have competitors on their own architecture/terms than something out of their control.
- arvinsim 6y agoNvidia bought ARM so it would be interesting to see where this goes.
- AgentOrange1234 6y agoI wonder how much easier? Could devs use the Rosetta emulator to do x86 stuff on the ARM Macs anyway?
- rnantes 6y agoI could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. - They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud
- amluto 6y agoUnless something has changed radically since MacOS Server failed, Apple would either need to do massive software engineering of a sort that they are unfamiliar with or they would need to use a different OS entirely to have a credible cloud offering. Mac OS is unlikely to be able to compete with Linux or FreeBSD in the near future even if the CPU is magically better.
- tpetry 6y agoThey could have a very bare bone macOS based server operating system specialised for running virtual machines. Dont they have their own xhyve virtualisation layer?
- ravi-delia 6y agoA lot of the prelim work is probably already being done with their docker optimizations.
- _ph_ 6y agoFederighi mentioned during some interviews after the Big Sur presentation, that macOS is a great hypervisor for vitualisation, when asked about Linux on AS Macs. Running Linux in the cloud would equally easy.
- snazz 6y agoApple’s in-house cloud stuff is mostly Java on commodity Linux servers. I don’t think they are looking to have macOS compete with Linux. Most of the special sauce from GCP and AWS is the integrated software services anyway.
- snapetom 6y agoRe: ARM - spot on. They sold their XScale/StrongARM assets right around the same time Apple switched to them. They were probably riding high on that win. However, market growth switched so quickly from PC to mobile/IoT, they couldn't get in. Instead, they just wasted resources on projects like Moblin which became boondoggles.