26 ms·

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can

Somewhere, the collective whos who of the silicon chip world is shitting their pants. Apple just showed to the world how powerful and efficient processors can be. All that with good design. Customers are going to demand more from Intel and the likes. Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. edit: a word.

samgranieri 6y ago
I don't think Apple will go back to creating server infrastructure again. In the interim, I know Amazon created an ARM server chip called Graviton, and I'd like to run a kubernetes cluster on that
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  I hope they do, because, ultimately, it will be good for the environment.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Yes, you can run a kubernetes cluster using it. It's been available for a year: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/08/amazon-eks-support-for-arm-based-instances-powered-by-aws-graviton-now-generally-available/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/08/amazon-ek...
- qaq 6y ago
  They should do a cloud they have some very unique tech like foundationDB based SQL RDBMS and M chips and prob a lot more cool thingies.
- nonameiguess 6y ago
  A lot of other fairly standard cloud native technologies don't yet work on ARM, notably istio, even though most implementations of kubernetes itself will work. This is the major thing preventing me from being able to use a Macbook even for development (at least an M1, but that's all I have).
- tambourine_man 6y ago
  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ez-8qRYUUAIoukD?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ez-8qRYUUAIoukD?format=jpg
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  The latest Mac Pro does come in a rack mount option, but I'm not sure what market it's targeting.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeffy90 6y ago
    Maybe ios ci/cd build infrastructure?
  - evanmoran 6y ago
    I think it’s mainly for Mac / iOS development CI systems like for CircleCI or Mac Stadium. The hardware just seems too expensive for it to replace more generic arm services that AWS is offering.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      On-site music and video production. You can rack it in a portable rack with your other racks of music equipment and it fits in the back of a van.
      - lukeh 6y ago
        Well, if your portable rack happens to be way deeper than most audio racks…
        selectodude 6y ago
        If you're wheeling around five to six figures worth of audio production equipment often enough to want the rackmount Mac Pro, I think the cost of a new rack is almost a rounding error.
  - mlindner 6y ago
    Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) talks about the target market some in his videos about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7Zu3LoeG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7Zu3LoeG8 In short, it's for media production, not computing. You put it in a media rack.
- lozaning 6y ago
  I would do truly terrible things for an updated xserve RAID (the most beautiful computing device ever made) that supported SATA or NVME drives. Right now I've got IDE to SATA adapters in mine, which leaves just enough space to also squeeze 2.5" sata ssd into 3.5" drive caddies.
partiallypro 6y ago
If we're honest most customers aren't going to notice the performance differences, it will mostly be people with heavy work loads.
- sgt 6y ago
  Not true at all. M1 and follow-ups are about single thread performance, the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice.
  - merdadicapra 6y ago
    > the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice Remember when Apple made the Power Mac QUAD, to indicate that the system had FOUR processors, because "men should not live of single thread performance alone"? > "With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture and the fastest workstation card from Nvidia, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement. Of course they can't advertise the multi core performances, because they are lower compared to similar systems, just like with the Power Mac they could not advertise that the system was greener, because it wasn't.
    - astrange 6y ago
      The multicore performance is good for a portable, because background threads can run on the efficiency cores without making the whole system thermal throttle. Intel can't do that.
      - floatboth 6y ago
        Not right now, but the upcoming Intel thing will combine Atom cores and Core cores (lol) like that. AMD is the one left without an "efficiency core"… but I wouldn't be that surprised if they somehow manage to squeeze almost the same efficiency out of just low power modes on the same Zen core, which would leave them with better multi-core performance as usual.
merdadicapra 6y ago
1 - Apple is not going to enter the server market ever again, especially not the generalist cloud infrastructure 2 - 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops, most of them are sub $500 laptops. Amazon best selling is ASUS Laptop L210 Ultra Thin Laptop, 11.6” HD Display, Intel Celeron N4020 Processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB Storage priced at $199 Basically only Mac users who upgraded to M1 are going to notice the difference
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops, most of them are sub $500 laptops. Apple’s share of the total PC shipments is closer to 15% now and their share of the laptop market is even higher.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    ... in the US. It's a different story worldwide where Apple is around 8% (source: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/11/mac-huge-q4-growth-49-percent/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/11/mac-huge-q4-growth-49-percent...).
  - neogodless 6y ago
    I tried a variety of Google searches, but I can't find information specifically narrowed down to Apple's share of the notebook/laptop market in the U.S. Can you help me?
- Logon90 6y ago
  And there are still Pentium processors running out there somewhere in Africa, how is it relevant?
- jhayward 6y ago
  > 2 - 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops, This is perhaps the wrong metric to look at. What % of total profit is Apple capturing? Several years ago the accepted wisdom in phones was that Apple was getting ~30% of the unit volume and 90% of the profit.
huitzitziltzin 6y ago
I think you are exactly right, but we should celebrate that! This kind of competitive pressure will inspire a response from Intel and other firms. The result I would predict and hope for in a few years would be better chips from everyone in the market.
- neogodless 6y ago
  I'm not saying what you think is wrong, but your view seems like it may be narrow, and missing the bigger ecosystem. Intel has certainly dominated consumer computer sales over the past decade, and until 4 years ago they were largely still selling the best chips for most consumer use cases (outside of mobile.) Intel had several missteps, but I don't think their dominant position was the only source of their problems, or simply that they thought they didn't have to try. They legitimately had some bad decisions and engineering problems. While the management is now changing, and that might get their engineering ducks in a row, the replacement of Intel with Apple Silicon in Apple's products is not likely to be some kind of "waking up" moment for Intel, in my opinion. Either they'll figure out their problems and somehow get back on an even keel with other chip designers and fabrication, or they won't. Meanwhile other competitors in x86 and ARM have also have a short-term history of success and failure, again regardless of what Apple is doing. And the timelines for these plans of execution are often measured in the scale of two to three years, and I'm not seeing how Apple successfully designing CPUs would change these roadmaps for competitors. For everyone involved, particularly those utilizing TSMC, there are benefits over time as processes improve and enable increases in performance and efficiency due to process rather than design, and the increased density will benefit any chip designers that can afford to get on newer processes. I guess if I'd attempt to summarize, it's not clear who is motivated and able to compete against Apple in ARM design. In other words, is there a clear ARM market outside of iOS/macOS and outside of Android (where chip designers already compete)? And in the Linux/Windows consumer computing space, there's going to be a divide. Those that can accept a transition to macOS and value the incredible efficiency of Apple Silicon will do so. Those that continue buying within their previous ecosystems will continuing comparing the options they have (Intel/AMD), where currently chips are getting better. AMD has been executing very well over four years now, and Intel's latest chips are bringing solid gains in IPC and integrated GPU performance, though they still have process issues to overcome if they wish to catch back up in efficiency, and they may also need to resolve process issues to regain a foothold in HEDT. But even there, where AMD seems pretty clearly superior on most metrics, the shift in market share is slow, and momentum plus capacity give Intel a lot of runway. The only other consideration is for Windows to transition to ARM, but there's still a bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Will an ARM chip come out with Apple Silicon like performance, despite poor x86 emulation software in Windows when run on ARM? Or will Microsoft create a Rosetta-like translation software that eases the transition? I'm not clear on what will drive either of those to happen.
flohofwoe 6y ago
Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).
- mojo982 6y ago
  You are right. And I hate it.
- nemo1618 6y ago
  Even today the M1 still feels slow occasionally -- hanging for a second or two, browser taking multiple seconds to launch, etc. Granted, that could be due to I/O or power management, but in any case it's clear that software is not making proper use of hardware.
  - pentae 6y ago
    What you just described only happens for me with Chrome on my M1 MBA. Try loading Safari, its instant.
- SSLy 6y ago
  This is called "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."
  - homarp 6y ago
    and this is now called Electron trading speed of development with 'hardware optimization'. Mac being a small market, some users are still opiniated/loud enough to reward nicer/native UI vs cross-ish platform lowest common denominator UI. Maybe there is hope Arm mac stays fast.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      + Mac OS checking every binary you run over the internet.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
Amazon's Graviton 2 is the M1 of the server world in my experience. It's faster, cheaper, and overall a better experience than any other instance type for most workloads. You have to get through a bit of a learning curve with multiarch or cross-compiling to ARM64 depending on what your codebase is like, but after that it's smooth sailing. Azure and Google need to really step up and get some competitive (or even any) ARM instances--fast.
- sneak 6y ago
  It's pretty crazy how good the Graviton processors are. What's even more crazy is that you cannot buy them. Such price/perf is literally only available to rent from AWS. I hope Oxide does something about this soon; it is a sort of dangerous situation to have such a competitive advantage only be available via rental from a single (large and anticompetitive) company.
  - qbasic_forever 6y ago
    Yeah, I kinda wish Amazon would make a Graviton 2 powered laptop or dev machine. It would be really nice to develop directly on the ISA for the instance instead of cross-compiling. An Apple M1 of course works, but more ARM64 laptops need to be available. It's sad that it never got traction in the Windows hardware world.
    - sneak 6y ago
      My concern is data centers, not development systems. One can always just ssh/x11/rdp/whatever into the Graviton machines. There's also nothing wrong with the $999 M1 Air. Isn't the Surface also ARM? And most Chromebooks? After you've already got the code, though, it's Amazon's way or the highway.
      - floatboth 6y ago
        Packet used to offer bare metal Ampere eMAGs (and old Cavium ThunderX's)… current Equinix Metal website doesn't seem to list any arm instances though :/ Apparently Oracle Cloud is going to offer both VMs and bare metal on Ampere Altras.
supernova87a 6y ago
My layman's understanding was that M1 chips had very efficient low-power/idle usage, and better memory + instructions pipelining architecture for jobs composed of diverse (inconsistent) size and "shape". And that's why it blows away consumer workload Intel chips. In a server high load environment, is this still the case? Continuous load, consistent jobs -- is the M1 still that much better or does its advantages decrease?
jcadam 6y ago
After the XServe, I wouldn't touch Apple servers with a 10 foot pole.
sschueller 6y ago
But it's not really the chip, we have powerful ARM CPU every except on desktops. It's the combination of software and the chip that makes this a huge computing jump. No one wanted to invest in rewriting software to switch away from x86.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  Exactly this. Nobody cares about the M1 except for tech enthusiasts and Apple fans. The problem is that you effectively have to run macOS to take advantage of it and that's a no-go for a wide variety of people. I don't even care if I can ever run Windows or Linux on an M1 because Apple will make it a pain in the ass to do so. They don't even have a fucking bios UI... Imagine enterprise IT shops rolling Windows out on that garbage? It'll never happen. And I don't want ARM at all unless the systems built around it are as modular and open as the x86 ecosystem.
amelius 6y ago
> Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. As a developer, I'm sweating bullets. Imagine a future where Apple is the only serious platform left on mobile, server and desktop, then developers can forget about starting that next disruptive startup and instead they will become just second-class Apple "employees" with contracts similar to Uber drivers.
- nexuist 6y ago
  Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over the ARM space; in fact I think we will see the emergence of new players as ARM isn't as finicky about licensing their tech as Intel is. The only reason Intel even had a competitor (AMD) in the past 20 years is because they licensed x86 to them before it started becoming the de facto choice.
  - spockz 6y ago
    You would need to think quite far out of the box and hit it to be able to beat a vertically integrated, extremely well-funded, and successful company.
    - zepto 6y ago
      There are lots of very rich companies that claim to want to compete but choose not to take the risks Apple did, of investing in their own vertical integration.
      - bombcar 6y ago
        Each individual risk Apple takes is small - they didn’t develop the M1 from scratch; they have years of iPhone and iPad processor development under their belt.
zucker42 6y ago
What makes you think that M1 would be better in servers than Ampere's chips or Graviton for instance? Desktop and server chips have different design goals.
vondur 6y ago
From some the demos I've seen on YouTube, the Nvidia Jetson AGX would make for a really nice desktop. If Nvidia could release a desktop oriented ARM machine with its graphics chips integration, it could make for a really nice workstation.
floatingatoll 6y ago
Most server infrastructure isn’t designed to be efficient to the degree that Apple’s OS is. I think until we see a significant increase in datacenter power costs due to carbon neutral, we’ll start to see developers focusing more on ekeing out the most performance per watt. Apple’s been doing that for decades and has dragged developers along, kicking and screaming about the upgrade cycle, until they reached today’s pinnacle M1 chip and macOS and iPadOS. The unixy community has refused for years to use macOS APIs unless commanded to by Apple, and only the upgrade to TLS 1.3 finally started compelling app developers to bundle OpenSSL (rather than use SecureTransport), and open source server-type developer adoption of Metal and MLKit and whatever the HTTP request library is (I forgot, sorry) is essentially nonexistent. So the apps that “server infrastructure” might use M1 for are, bluntly, not equipped to perform very well on M1 today. I’ll know that Apple is a serious contender for datacenters when PHP is updated to use native macOS APIs when running on macOS, because that’s a great litmus test for whether open source is ready to compromise on “generic computing is king” in favor of “high-performance OS APIs for specific hardware platforms”. I’m not holding my breath, and I don’t think most open source projects are willing or able to either decide to take these steps or actually deliver on any such intent. Apple seems content to offer rackmount macOS and that’s more than sufficient for serious businesses that need serious amounts of Apple-accelerated hardware. But I don’t consider most “Internet cloud server” businesses to need that, and I don’t see the developers of our clouds as being willing to give up their dylib freedoms in exchange for higher performance per watt. EDIT: Think of M1 as a hardware platform dedicated to code that's been ported to Apple’s microkernel, if that helps any. Yeah, it’s not “micro”, in theory; except they run a stripped-down iOS on their HDMI dongle (yes, seriously), so clearly they’re quite capable of “micro” kernel. More on kernels today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26954547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26954547
busymom0 6y ago
I think Apple's been making major leaps in hardware but slow as a turtle when it comes to software. iPad is restricted by the software despite having the best hardwares in its category. Really wish they would pay some attention to it.
emodendroket 6y ago
Well the problem there is you can't really have the traditional mix and match part selection and get that kind of performance, right?
SergeAx 6y ago
Apple will never sell it's chips standalone. Phone, desktop or server, whatever. I can see them building Mx cloud servers and trying to peddle it for CI pipelines, but not selling actual iron.

samgranieri 6y ago

I don't think Apple will go back to creating server infrastructure again. In the interim, I know Amazon created an ARM server chip called Graviton, and I'd like to run a kubernetes cluster on that

kumarvvr 6y ago
I hope they do, because, ultimately, it will be good for the environment.
Jonnax 6y ago
Yes, you can run a kubernetes cluster using it. It's been available for a year: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/08/amazon-eks-support-for-arm-based-instances-powered-by-aws-graviton-now-generally-available/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/08/amazon-ek...
qaq 6y ago
They should do a cloud they have some very unique tech like foundationDB based SQL RDBMS and M chips and prob a lot more cool thingies.
nonameiguess 6y ago
A lot of other fairly standard cloud native technologies don't yet work on ARM, notably istio, even though most implementations of kubernetes itself will work. This is the major thing preventing me from being able to use a Macbook even for development (at least an M1, but that's all I have).
tambourine_man 6y ago
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ez-8qRYUUAIoukD?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ez-8qRYUUAIoukD?format=jpg
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
The latest Mac Pro does come in a rack mount option, but I'm not sure what market it's targeting.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jeffy90 6y ago
  Maybe ios ci/cd build infrastructure?
- evanmoran 6y ago
  I think it’s mainly for Mac / iOS development CI systems like for CircleCI or Mac Stadium. The hardware just seems too expensive for it to replace more generic arm services that AWS is offering.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    On-site music and video production. You can rack it in a portable rack with your other racks of music equipment and it fits in the back of a van.
    - lukeh 6y ago
      Well, if your portable rack happens to be way deeper than most audio racks…
      - selectodude 6y ago
        If you're wheeling around five to six figures worth of audio production equipment often enough to want the rackmount Mac Pro, I think the cost of a new rack is almost a rounding error.
- mlindner 6y ago
  Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) talks about the target market some in his videos about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7Zu3LoeG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7Zu3LoeG8 In short, it's for media production, not computing. You put it in a media rack.
lozaning 6y ago
I would do truly terrible things for an updated xserve RAID (the most beautiful computing device ever made) that supported SATA or NVME drives. Right now I've got IDE to SATA adapters in mine, which leaves just enough space to also squeeze 2.5" sata ssd into 3.5" drive caddies.

partiallypro 6y ago

If we're honest most customers aren't going to notice the performance differences, it will mostly be people with heavy work loads.

sgt 6y ago
Not true at all. M1 and follow-ups are about single thread performance, the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice.
- merdadicapra 6y ago
  > the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice Remember when Apple made the Power Mac QUAD, to indicate that the system had FOUR processors, because "men should not live of single thread performance alone"? > "With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture and the fastest workstation card from Nvidia, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement. Of course they can't advertise the multi core performances, because they are lower compared to similar systems, just like with the Power Mac they could not advertise that the system was greener, because it wasn't.
  - astrange 6y ago
    The multicore performance is good for a portable, because background threads can run on the efficiency cores without making the whole system thermal throttle. Intel can't do that.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      Not right now, but the upcoming Intel thing will combine Atom cores and Core cores (lol) like that. AMD is the one left without an "efficiency core"… but I wouldn't be that surprised if they somehow manage to squeeze almost the same efficiency out of just low power modes on the same Zen core, which would leave them with better multi-core performance as usual.

merdadicapra 6y ago

1 - Apple is not going to enter the server market ever again, especially not the generalist cloud infrastructure 2 - 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops, most of them are sub $500 laptops. Amazon best selling is ASUS Laptop L210 Ultra Thin Laptop, 11.6” HD Display, Intel Celeron N4020 Processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB Storage priced at $199 Basically only Mac users who upgraded to M1 are going to notice the difference

ogre_codes 6y ago
> 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops, most of them are sub $500 laptops. Apple’s share of the total PC shipments is closer to 15% now and their share of the laptop market is even higher.
- dgellow 6y ago
  ... in the US. It's a different story worldwide where Apple is around 8% (source: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/11/mac-huge-q4-growth-49-percent/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/11/mac-huge-q4-growth-49-percent...).
- neogodless 6y ago
  I tried a variety of Google searches, but I can't find information specifically narrowed down to Apple's share of the notebook/laptop market in the U.S. Can you help me?
Logon90 6y ago
And there are still Pentium processors running out there somewhere in Africa, how is it relevant?
jhayward 6y ago
> 2 - 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops, This is perhaps the wrong metric to look at. What % of total profit is Apple capturing? Several years ago the accepted wisdom in phones was that Apple was getting ~30% of the unit volume and 90% of the profit.

huitzitziltzin 6y ago

I think you are exactly right, but we should celebrate that! This kind of competitive pressure will inspire a response from Intel and other firms. The result I would predict and hope for in a few years would be better chips from everyone in the market.

neogodless 6y ago
I'm not saying what you think is wrong, but your view seems like it may be narrow, and missing the bigger ecosystem. Intel has certainly dominated consumer computer sales over the past decade, and until 4 years ago they were largely still selling the best chips for most consumer use cases (outside of mobile.) Intel had several missteps, but I don't think their dominant position was the only source of their problems, or simply that they thought they didn't have to try. They legitimately had some bad decisions and engineering problems. While the management is now changing, and that might get their engineering ducks in a row, the replacement of Intel with Apple Silicon in Apple's products is not likely to be some kind of "waking up" moment for Intel, in my opinion. Either they'll figure out their problems and somehow get back on an even keel with other chip designers and fabrication, or they won't. Meanwhile other competitors in x86 and ARM have also have a short-term history of success and failure, again regardless of what Apple is doing. And the timelines for these plans of execution are often measured in the scale of two to three years, and I'm not seeing how Apple successfully designing CPUs would change these roadmaps for competitors. For everyone involved, particularly those utilizing TSMC, there are benefits over time as processes improve and enable increases in performance and efficiency due to process rather than design, and the increased density will benefit any chip designers that can afford to get on newer processes. I guess if I'd attempt to summarize, it's not clear who is motivated and able to compete against Apple in ARM design. In other words, is there a clear ARM market outside of iOS/macOS and outside of Android (where chip designers already compete)? And in the Linux/Windows consumer computing space, there's going to be a divide. Those that can accept a transition to macOS and value the incredible efficiency of Apple Silicon will do so. Those that continue buying within their previous ecosystems will continuing comparing the options they have (Intel/AMD), where currently chips are getting better. AMD has been executing very well over four years now, and Intel's latest chips are bringing solid gains in IPC and integrated GPU performance, though they still have process issues to overcome if they wish to catch back up in efficiency, and they may also need to resolve process issues to regain a foothold in HEDT. But even there, where AMD seems pretty clearly superior on most metrics, the shift in market share is slow, and momentum plus capacity give Intel a lot of runway. The only other consideration is for Windows to transition to ARM, but there's still a bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Will an ARM chip come out with Apple Silicon like performance, despite poor x86 emulation software in Windows when run on ARM? Or will Microsoft create a Rosetta-like translation software that eases the transition? I'm not clear on what will drive either of those to happen.

flohofwoe 6y ago

Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).

mojo982 6y ago
You are right. And I hate it.
nemo1618 6y ago
Even today the M1 still feels slow occasionally -- hanging for a second or two, browser taking multiple seconds to launch, etc. Granted, that could be due to I/O or power management, but in any case it's clear that software is not making proper use of hardware.
- pentae 6y ago
  What you just described only happens for me with Chrome on my M1 MBA. Try loading Safari, its instant.
SSLy 6y ago
This is called "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."
- homarp 6y ago
  and this is now called Electron trading speed of development with 'hardware optimization'. Mac being a small market, some users are still opiniated/loud enough to reward nicer/native UI vs cross-ish platform lowest common denominator UI. Maybe there is hope Arm mac stays fast.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    + Mac OS checking every binary you run over the internet.

qbasic_forever 6y ago

Amazon's Graviton 2 is the M1 of the server world in my experience. It's faster, cheaper, and overall a better experience than any other instance type for most workloads. You have to get through a bit of a learning curve with multiarch or cross-compiling to ARM64 depending on what your codebase is like, but after that it's smooth sailing. Azure and Google need to really step up and get some competitive (or even any) ARM instances--fast.

sneak 6y ago
It's pretty crazy how good the Graviton processors are. What's even more crazy is that you cannot buy them. Such price/perf is literally only available to rent from AWS. I hope Oxide does something about this soon; it is a sort of dangerous situation to have such a competitive advantage only be available via rental from a single (large and anticompetitive) company.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Yeah, I kinda wish Amazon would make a Graviton 2 powered laptop or dev machine. It would be really nice to develop directly on the ISA for the instance instead of cross-compiling. An Apple M1 of course works, but more ARM64 laptops need to be available. It's sad that it never got traction in the Windows hardware world.
  - sneak 6y ago
    My concern is data centers, not development systems. One can always just ssh/x11/rdp/whatever into the Graviton machines. There's also nothing wrong with the $999 M1 Air. Isn't the Surface also ARM? And most Chromebooks? After you've already got the code, though, it's Amazon's way or the highway.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      Packet used to offer bare metal Ampere eMAGs (and old Cavium ThunderX's)… current Equinix Metal website doesn't seem to list any arm instances though :/ Apparently Oracle Cloud is going to offer both VMs and bare metal on Ampere Altras.

supernova87a 6y ago

My layman's understanding was that M1 chips had very efficient low-power/idle usage, and better memory + instructions pipelining architecture for jobs composed of diverse (inconsistent) size and "shape". And that's why it blows away consumer workload Intel chips. In a server high load environment, is this still the case? Continuous load, consistent jobs -- is the M1 still that much better or does its advantages decrease?

jcadam 6y ago

After the XServe, I wouldn't touch Apple servers with a 10 foot pole.

sschueller 6y ago

But it's not really the chip, we have powerful ARM CPU every except on desktops. It's the combination of software and the chip that makes this a huge computing jump. No one wanted to invest in rewriting software to switch away from x86.

wayneftw 6y ago
Exactly this. Nobody cares about the M1 except for tech enthusiasts and Apple fans. The problem is that you effectively have to run macOS to take advantage of it and that's a no-go for a wide variety of people. I don't even care if I can ever run Windows or Linux on an M1 because Apple will make it a pain in the ass to do so. They don't even have a fucking bios UI... Imagine enterprise IT shops rolling Windows out on that garbage? It'll never happen. And I don't want ARM at all unless the systems built around it are as modular and open as the x86 ecosystem.

amelius 6y ago

> Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now. As a developer, I'm sweating bullets. Imagine a future where Apple is the only serious platform left on mobile, server and desktop, then developers can forget about starting that next disruptive startup and instead they will become just second-class Apple "employees" with contracts similar to Uber drivers.

nexuist 6y ago
Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86. That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over the ARM space; in fact I think we will see the emergence of new players as ARM isn't as finicky about licensing their tech as Intel is. The only reason Intel even had a competitor (AMD) in the past 20 years is because they licensed x86 to them before it started becoming the de facto choice.
- spockz 6y ago
  You would need to think quite far out of the box and hit it to be able to beat a vertically integrated, extremely well-funded, and successful company.
  - zepto 6y ago
    There are lots of very rich companies that claim to want to compete but choose not to take the risks Apple did, of investing in their own vertical integration.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      Each individual risk Apple takes is small - they didn’t develop the M1 from scratch; they have years of iPhone and iPad processor development under their belt.

zucker42 6y ago

What makes you think that M1 would be better in servers than Ampere's chips or Graviton for instance? Desktop and server chips have different design goals.

vondur 6y ago

From some the demos I've seen on YouTube, the Nvidia Jetson AGX would make for a really nice desktop. If Nvidia could release a desktop oriented ARM machine with its graphics chips integration, it could make for a really nice workstation.

floatingatoll 6y ago

Most server infrastructure isn’t designed to be efficient to the degree that Apple’s OS is. I think until we see a significant increase in datacenter power costs due to carbon neutral, we’ll start to see developers focusing more on ekeing out the most performance per watt. Apple’s been doing that for decades and has dragged developers along, kicking and screaming about the upgrade cycle, until they reached today’s pinnacle M1 chip and macOS and iPadOS. The unixy community has refused for years to use macOS APIs unless commanded to by Apple, and only the upgrade to TLS 1.3 finally started compelling app developers to bundle OpenSSL (rather than use SecureTransport), and open source server-type developer adoption of Metal and MLKit and whatever the HTTP request library is (I forgot, sorry) is essentially nonexistent. So the apps that “server infrastructure” might use M1 for are, bluntly, not equipped to perform very well on M1 today. I’ll know that Apple is a serious contender for datacenters when PHP is updated to use native macOS APIs when running on macOS, because that’s a great litmus test for whether open source is ready to compromise on “generic computing is king” in favor of “high-performance OS APIs for specific hardware platforms”. I’m not holding my breath, and I don’t think most open source projects are willing or able to either decide to take these steps or actually deliver on any such intent. Apple seems content to offer rackmount macOS and that’s more than sufficient for serious businesses that need serious amounts of Apple-accelerated hardware. But I don’t consider most “Internet cloud server” businesses to need that, and I don’t see the developers of our clouds as being willing to give up their dylib freedoms in exchange for higher performance per watt. EDIT: Think of M1 as a hardware platform dedicated to code that's been ported to Apple’s microkernel, if that helps any. Yeah, it’s not “micro”, in theory; except they run a stripped-down iOS on their HDMI dongle (yes, seriously), so clearly they’re quite capable of “micro” kernel. More on kernels today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26954547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26954547

busymom0 6y ago

I think Apple's been making major leaps in hardware but slow as a turtle when it comes to software. iPad is restricted by the software despite having the best hardwares in its category. Really wish they would pay some attention to it.

emodendroket 6y ago

Well the problem there is you can't really have the traditional mix and match part selection and get that kind of performance, right?

SergeAx 6y ago

Apple will never sell it's chips standalone. Phone, desktop or server, whatever. I can see them building Mx cloud servers and trying to peddle it for CI pipelines, but not selling actual iron.