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Unless Apple intends to get into the server business, I think the market at the top is very small. They really only have to be competitive with the lower core
by eloff 6y ago
Unless Apple intends to get into the server business, I think the market at the top is very small.
They really only have to be competitive with the lower core consumer chips to accomplish their goal.
I think they should try for the performance crown though and the server business. There's a lot of money in that. In servers power consumption is an important consideration and they have an advantage there as well. ARM based architectures are also a lot more relaxed in that they don't have to present a nearly sequentially consistent view of cache and memory between multiple cores like x86. That may give them an edge scaling the core count. It's horrible to program for if you are coding lock free algorithms, but almost nobody does that and fewer should.
- em500 6y agoTheir current 28-core Mac Pro (which even has a rack version) is probably not a volume business either, that doesn't stop them from making them. It's probably much cheaper to go for the performance crown with their own CPU now than with Intel/AMD in the past. See it as Apples Bugatti Veyron/Chiron :)
- eloff 6y agoThey didn't have to make a special chip for it though, it can be economical to offer a small volume product made of off the shelf components. It's a losing venture to do it with custom designed chips - that's extremely expensive and I doubt the market is large enough to justify it. Unless they intend to get into servers. I'm very curious to see what they do.
- _ph_ 6y agoThey have to make a server-class chip if they want to have something like the Mac Pro on ARM too. To actually go into the server business they might have to add a bit more I/O capability like Epyc vs. Threadripper, but the basic cpu should be more than up to it, if it has 32 performance cores or more. Even just a rack-mounted M1 would be interesting for many server applications and anything above more so.
- qualityonly 6y agoThat is probably the most interesting idea, low power consumption for non power user's servers. Although I don't see why you wouldn't spin up a few VMs per server. Cheaper and (unconfirmed) more energy efficient.
- toast0 6y ago> Unless Apple intends to get into the server business, I think the market at the top is very small. Their OS is pretty unsuitable for server tasks[1], and they've abandoned most of their server tools, so I think they don't care about that market anymore. [1] No synflood mitigations, easy to panic by spawning threads that sleep.
- xhkkffbf 6y agoThe OS is not exactly unstable but increasingly worthless for my desktop work. The spinning beachball of death sucks.
- eloff 6y agoI don't think their OS would be popular in the server space. But you could run Linux on their chips - if they decided to support that.
- vbezhenar 6y agoThey can use Linux like they do now.
- notriddle 6y agoNo, they shouldn't. There's a reason Apple don't make Time Capsules any more. Servers are usually commodities, and Apple don't make commodities if they can reasonably avoid it (anything they make that's even close to a commodity still, at least, can be turned into a fashion accessory, like the aluminum keyboards and stuff). Commodity suppliers get put into bidding wars, and operate on razor-thin margins. Apple have basically opened the market for ARM servers by producing a workstation to go with them. Amazon is probably feeling pretty vindicated for Gravitron right now. Everybody else will catch up with them over the next five years or so, I'm sure.
- dingaling 6y agoAnd to invert that point, data center operators only buy commodities[1]. They won't be interested in a single-source option with invariable pricing. [1] Excepting those big enough to build their own
- dangus 6y agoChange selling chips and servers to selling cloud computing. I don’t think Apple will do it considering how far behind they are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they start an AWS competitor using Apple Silicon. Cloud computing is never 100% a commodity because there’s always business logic to sell. Sure, S3 and EC2 are by this point commodities, but cloud products like Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL are not. Businesses are plenty interested in single source cloud computing, there are tons of shops that basically can’t leave AWS without a monumental effort.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago>Apple don't make commodities ARM chips are also commodities nowadays. I lost count of how many companies make them. Yet Apple chose to make their own. Charging circuitry chips are also commodities and Apple bought the division of Dialog semiconductors making such chips to have in house knowledge. Now Apple bought the modem division of Intel so we're gonna see GSM modems from them in the future.
- 6y ago
- spacedcowboy 6y agoApple have a vested interest in getting into the server business. They have a lot of machines in datacenters. Some in the US, some in China, some dotted at other datacenters they own around the world. Replacing the Intel machines with something that runs (a) faster and (b) with less power, is a double-win. I'd frankly be amazed if there wasn't a N-core or N-module server setup somewhere within the spaceship undergoing tests. And it's not that far from there to selling a Mac-based server. Which they've done before, after all...