4 ms·

This is stupefying to me. Like, when Anand did the A12 or A11 reviews, I wrote: "The craziest thing is how close [to 1/56th of a Xeon 8176] they get at 3W. Tha

by jfb 6y ago

This is stupefying to me. Like, when Anand did the A12 or A11 reviews, I wrote: "The craziest thing is how close [to 1/56th of a Xeon 8176] they get at 3W. That's the part that's staggering. What could Apple do with, say, laptop thermals? Desktop thermals? The mind creeps closer to boggling." -- me, 5 October 2018 Guess we're finding out.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
Would this be good a chip for a data warehouse?
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I think so, especially with the specialized hardware in there for machine learning (although in a data center you'd probably opt for specialized hardware like discrete GPUs). There are some players on the market for ARM servers as well. That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. They might use variations of it in their own data centers, maybe.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. I wonder if this could potentially be a good time to bring back Xserve...
    - _ph_ 6y ago
      They definitely should. Even if the profit on the device wouldn't be decisive, but chip making is all about production numbers. Using the Apple Silicon first for all the Apple owned cloud servers and then offering them in Xserve units would be very profitable and could reduce the power draw of data warehouses a lot.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        The question marks for me would be: 1) Is Apple interested (and capable) making macOS into a realistic choice for servers again? 2) If not, is Apple comfortable with selling a box that most people will put Linux on? Would they put resources into a Bootcamp-esque driver package?
        _ph_ 6y ago
        The biggest question is: does Apple want to bring back the Xserver? If yes, there are several ways. If not, no good proposal will sway them :) But one thing was interesting during the AS announcement at WWDC. Federighi stressed how good a hypervisor macOS is. That was probably first of all a comment about virtualization on the new Macs, but could also allow to install any operation system as guest on a cloud server. Many cloud services are running inside VMs.
        iSnow 6y ago
        The only reason for that statement is to silence those who would raise a stink over the loss of Bootcamp. "See, you don't need native Linux on the machine, just use our hypervisor & Docker/VMs"
        _ph_ 6y ago
        Yes, that was the context of the statement. But it also would give an answer how customers would use an AS Xserve.
    - jfb 6y ago
      The market for Mac OS specific services would be vanishingly small; everybody else can just use Linux. Apple's not going to make a play for a commodity market.

by jfb 6y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago

Would this be good a chip for a data warehouse?

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I think so, especially with the specialized hardware in there for machine learning (although in a data center you'd probably opt for specialized hardware like discrete GPUs). There are some players on the market for ARM servers as well. That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. They might use variations of it in their own data centers, maybe.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. I wonder if this could potentially be a good time to bring back Xserve...
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    They definitely should. Even if the profit on the device wouldn't be decisive, but chip making is all about production numbers. Using the Apple Silicon first for all the Apple owned cloud servers and then offering them in Xserve units would be very profitable and could reduce the power draw of data warehouses a lot.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      The question marks for me would be: 1) Is Apple interested (and capable) making macOS into a realistic choice for servers again? 2) If not, is Apple comfortable with selling a box that most people will put Linux on? Would they put resources into a Bootcamp-esque driver package?
      - _ph_ 6y ago
        The biggest question is: does Apple want to bring back the Xserver? If yes, there are several ways. If not, no good proposal will sway them :) But one thing was interesting during the AS announcement at WWDC. Federighi stressed how good a hypervisor macOS is. That was probably first of all a comment about virtualization on the new Macs, but could also allow to install any operation system as guest on a cloud server. Many cloud services are running inside VMs.
        iSnow 6y ago
        The only reason for that statement is to silence those who would raise a stink over the loss of Bootcamp. "See, you don't need native Linux on the machine, just use our hypervisor & Docker/VMs"
        _ph_ 6y ago
        Yes, that was the context of the statement. But it also would give an answer how customers would use an AS Xserve.
  - jfb 6y ago
    The market for Mac OS specific services would be vanishingly small; everybody else can just use Linux. Apple's not going to make a play for a commodity market.