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Tangent: Apple should bring back the Xserve with their M1 line, or alternately license the M1 core IP to another company to produce a differently-branded server
by api 6y ago
Tangent: Apple should bring back the Xserve with their M1 line, or alternately license the M1 core IP to another company to produce a differently-branded server-oriented chip. The performance of that thing is mind blowing and I don't see how this would compete with or harm their desktop and mobile business.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoThe cheapest available Epyc (7313P) has 16 cores and dual socket systems have up to 128 cores and 256 threads. Server workloads are massively parallel, so a 4+4 core M1 would be embarrassed and Apple wouldn't want to subject themselves to that comparison. But another reason they won't do it is that TSMC has a finite amount of 5nm fab capacity. They can't make more of the chips than they already do.
- api 6y agoI'm thinking of a 64-core M1. It would not be the laptop chip.
- ac29 6y agoA 4+4 core M1 is 16 billion transistors. Some of that is the little cores, GPU, etc, but its not clear to me its practical to get, say 8x larger. That would be 128 billion transistors. As a point of comparison, NVIDIA's RTX 3090 is 28B transistors, and thats a huge, expensive chip.
- bombcar 6y agoHow much of that performance is on-chip memory and how usable/scalable is that? An Xserve that is limited to one CPU and can't have more RAM would pretty mediocre.
- _ph_ 6y agoI am also hoping for a return of the Xserve once Apple makes high-corecount variations of the Apple Silicon for the Mac Pro. This would have several benefits. First of all, it would greatly increase the production count of that variant, it could be too expensive to make such a chip just for the Mac Pro. In any case, it should be cheaper than an equivalent Intel CPU as Apple would not have to pay for Intels profits. And finally, just the power savings for the vast compute centers Apple operates should mean a lot of money saved too.