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I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attra
by jibcage 6y ago
I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attractive could change things.
- skohan 6y agoIt would seem really out of character for Apple to make a move in the server space.
- Someone1234 6y agoOr heck even just the general purpose chip space in general. Apple's current ARM offerings are strictly locked to their own hardware, and there's been no hints that they may move into the ARM-PC space selling general purpose chips and letting other vendors produce board. I'd expect to see that first before an Apple silicon powered server.
- skohan 6y agoYeah Apple's never been a component company, they're all about vertical integration. Still it's hard to imagine if they actually do end up producing the best price/performance processors that these would be relegated to consumer products given the massive opportunity it would represent in the server space for cloud-based companies to bring down costs.
- grecy 6y agoWe know they have tens of thousands of linux boxes running iCloud and the App Store and whatever else... if they can use their own ARM servers and reduce electricity use by 50%[1], you've gotta think they're looking serious at that, purely for themselves. Not to mention buying their own hardware will obviously save them. [1] https://twitter.com/ajassy/status/1318930486517927937?s=20 https://twitter.com/ajassy/status/1318930486517927937?s=20
- usrusr 6y agoPurely for themselves, or also for entering the cloud infrastructure market. In this day and age if you are big enough (Apple surely is) and happen to have superior server hardware it wouldn't really make sense to sell that hardware, you'd rather keep it and rent it out.
- kube-system 6y agoThe question is whether you can make a competitive cloud infrastructure service without x86. Imagine that would be a nonstarter for a lot of the market, at least now.
- skohan 6y agoarm in the cloud is already a thing. A lot of companies have been moving towards server-less infrastructure in the past few years, and I can't imagine it makes any difference at all for a large set of use-cases whether you're executing your 50-line go lambdas on x86 or arm.
- kube-system 6y agoThe vast majority of the potential market is running somewhere between some and all of their stuff on x86 stuff in the cloud. Of course someone could launch an ARM-only cloud. They'd either be severely limiting their potential market, or they'd have to convince prospects to migrate to ARM. Certainly not impossible, but is it competitive?
- skohan 6y agoWhat migration? Most of the code I have run in the cloud in the past 5 years has been in the form of managed services. I don't really know or care if AWS is running my code on ARM or x86.
- kube-system 6y ago
- reaperducer 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve Apple’s Xserves were awesome. Not cheap. Only marginally competitive. But a joy to work with because of all the nice little details like a FireWire port on the front so you could boot it off of an iPod.
- skohan 6y agoYeah I remember Xserve! But if anything it seems like it was evidence that Apple wasn't really able to "get" the server market, where hardware is a commodity and price and compatibility are basically the only concern. Not to say that couldn't change, especially if their own processors had a big advantage in price/performance, but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence that they have what it takes to succeed in this space.
- reaperducer 6y agoWhile most of your points are true, I will quibble with this: there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence that they have what it takes to succeed in this space. Does it matter? In 2006 and 2007 there were legions of pundits, columnists, and "experts" who said the same thing about Apple making a telephone. I wonder if there's a market for a server optimized for iOS builds. Cram as many Mx chips and possible into a rackable case with abundant cooling. Certainly it would be useful to Apple internally. But I wonder if there are enough iOS developers with the budget to make this workable.
- skohan 6y agoSure as I said, anything is possible, and that can change, but to be fair the iPhone is a consumer device, which was firmly within Apple's wheelhouse already when they were developing the first model. Do you really think there's a market for dedicated hardware for iOS build servers? I mean there is some market for this since CI vendors already do iOS builds, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to imagine there being enough demand for Apple to actually put the R&D and product development resources into making this a reality.
- 6y ago
- arvinsim 6y agoI don't see Apple selling their chips.
- kitotik 6y agoEven if they developed the server tech, it seems they’d be more likely to just use it internally to power their services as opposed to trying to reach a whole new market that historically they aren’t very good at working in.
- usrusr 6y agoThat's one of the many bad effects of vertical integration success: if all the most profitable use cases are harvested by a vertically integrated dominator, very little development budget will be available for less closed hardware that can be integrated in niche use case solutions.
- quantummkv 6y agoThey don't have to. As long as Apple can provide the ARM boxes for developers, others can and will create the ARM chips for the server.
- wmf 6y agoNuvia is basically the server version.