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It begs the question: what will happen to the server CPU market? Cooling is big deal on server farms. If these chips produce more power for less heat, it will w

It begs the question: what will happen to the server CPU market? Cooling is big deal on server farms. If these chips produce more power for less heat, it will win big for datacenters. Not even counting their power consumption for processors themselves - servers run round the clock... Any server motherboards or the likes of XServe expected on M1?

CodeWriter23 6y ago
Not the M1 but AWS has shipped 2nd Gen ARM servers and also arm64 patches for PHP 8 to kick Intel’s ass at price:performance https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c6/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c6/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/improving-performance-of-php-for-arm64-and-impact-on-amazon-ec2-m6g-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/improving-performance-o...
ksec 6y ago
Apple has massive DataCenters, after all Siri, Map, Speech Recognition is servicing over a billion customers. The question will be if Apple intend to have the chip they are going to be using in Mac Pro to be running inside their own DataCenter? It is highly unlikely Apple will be switching to macOS for their own Server infrastructure, so the question is would Apple make sure Linux works on their M1? Would the model make sense? Even if Apple manage to sell 100K Mac Pro a year, it would barely make up the cost of a new CPU SKUs. So they will certainly need more volume to amortised those cost. And Server seems like a logical extension to it. Would Apple start using and selling XServe? Considering they are so far ahead of competition and it is extremely power efficient. Electricity cost contribute to a lot of the Datacenter running cost. To me the M1 or A14X has always been the less exciting part, since everything is well known. You are limited by 10-20W TDP there is only so much you can do. The most interesting parts remains on the 100W+ TDP Apple Silicon.
- m_mueller 6y ago
  Datacenters are usually operating under either I/O bottlenecks or memory bandwidth bottlenecks, it is rarely bound by compute. So I think if anything they'd just want to have more on-chip memory for the server chips, and keep them at a low TDP, which would massively safe on power and cooling.
Teknoman117 6y ago
There is a reason Amazon, Google, etc. are looking into ARM servers, with Amazon having developed server class ARM parts and selling instances on them via AWS.

CodeWriter23 6y ago

Not the M1 but AWS has shipped 2nd Gen ARM servers and also arm64 patches for PHP 8 to kick Intel’s ass at price:performance https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c6/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c6/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/improving-performance-of-php-for-arm64-and-impact-on-amazon-ec2-m6g-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/improving-performance-o...

ksec 6y ago

Apple has massive DataCenters, after all Siri, Map, Speech Recognition is servicing over a billion customers. The question will be if Apple intend to have the chip they are going to be using in Mac Pro to be running inside their own DataCenter? It is highly unlikely Apple will be switching to macOS for their own Server infrastructure, so the question is would Apple make sure Linux works on their M1? Would the model make sense? Even if Apple manage to sell 100K Mac Pro a year, it would barely make up the cost of a new CPU SKUs. So they will certainly need more volume to amortised those cost. And Server seems like a logical extension to it. Would Apple start using and selling XServe? Considering they are so far ahead of competition and it is extremely power efficient. Electricity cost contribute to a lot of the Datacenter running cost. To me the M1 or A14X has always been the less exciting part, since everything is well known. You are limited by 10-20W TDP there is only so much you can do. The most interesting parts remains on the 100W+ TDP Apple Silicon.

m_mueller 6y ago
Datacenters are usually operating under either I/O bottlenecks or memory bandwidth bottlenecks, it is rarely bound by compute. So I think if anything they'd just want to have more on-chip memory for the server chips, and keep them at a low TDP, which would massively safe on power and cooling.

Teknoman117 6y ago

There is a reason Amazon, Google, etc. are looking into ARM servers, with Amazon having developed server class ARM parts and selling instances on them via AWS.