11 ms·

I can’t wait for the desktop-class Pro hardware. If you extrapolate on power consumption alone it would be a complete monster. They could do something gnarly li

I can’t wait for the desktop-class Pro hardware. If you extrapolate on power consumption alone it would be a complete monster. They could do something gnarly like fit 8 sockets on a single board and send your compute ability to level 9000. I’m hoping for a mid-tier unit though - a rebirth of the G4 Cube as a “Mac Mini Pro” I daily drive an M1 mini now and abuse the hell out of it. I’ve never heard the fan. It’s a remarkable device. I was installing a Homebrew package the other day on my i7 MacBook Pro and the fans kicked on - it almost startled me - I had forgotten about active cooling.

Groxx 5y ago
I managed to get the M1 fans running pretty enthusiastically with my first attempt: doing a normal build in a monorepo :| But performance, even with half the ram, was still stellar. Everything remains speedy, even when it's doing far too much.
DSingularity 5y ago
They will skip desktop and ship server chips. If the trends hold, they will have TCO savings which no cloud provider can resist.
- RealityVoid 5y ago
  I keep hearing this on HN and I do not buy it. The initial cost is much much greater than the competition and even at lower power draw, I don't see it being competitive. And I don't think Apple would even want to be competitive in this segment.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I know that AWS already have their own ARM chips: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/. I don't know about chips enough to understand how large is the gap between AWS and Apple when it comes to designing chips though.
  - BackBlast 5y ago
    I run arm servers in production. M1 performance core performance is about 3x graviton 2 and 2.5x ampere ultra in our stack. The efficiency core is about 0.6 graviton and a bit less than half ampere. Would love to have reasonably costed m1 instances but the value play for us is ampere.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      Thanks for sharing that.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  Apple will not enter the server chip market, hell Apple is not even selling any B2B products, and Jobs was always very vocal about how he doesn't like B2B.
kllrnohj 5y ago
> They could do something gnarly like fit 8 sockets on a single board Those sockets need to communicate with each other, and extremely quickly. And that I/O is very, very expensive in terms of power. Even with that you still end up with poor performance scaling, especially with anything that isn't numa aware (which almost nothing is) So no, that extrapolation doesn't make sense. But even ignoring that missing cost, 8x M1 Max's would be ~800w, give or take. That would work in a Mac Pro replacement, but that'd still be a significant power increase over many of the existing models.
- fulafel 5y ago
  Interesting idea about the power usage of the interconnect. I don't remember this being discussed as an issue in tech press writings about multisocket Xeon or EPYC systems. Do you happen to have any references?
  - mlyle 5y ago
    https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13124/IF%20Power%20EPYC.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13124/IF%20Power%20EPYC.pn... Here's EPYC 7601's "IF" power (it's really all the uncore power) vs. the core power. Going outside the chip means swinging lots of capacitance up and down, and modern interconnects swing that capacitance fast.
    - sroussey 5y ago
      Also why pci 4 and 5 require much more cooling for more than the cpu.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      And that's only for a 2p setup. An 8p setup would need even more interconnects per CPU depending on the architecture (eg, ring, mesh, etc..), which would have further impacts to performance depending on which tradeoffs are made.
ksec 5y ago
>a rebirth of the G4 Cube as a “Mac Mini Pro” That will be one of those shut up and take my money moment. Given how they have been going retro or paying tribute to past design in their recent new product lineup I am hoping a G4 Cube revival is actually within a possibility.
- nikanj 5y ago
  Apple has been on a weird spree of ”hey what if we listened to our customers”. Maybe they’ll add in the ”normal” desktop computer. The iMac comes with a screen I don’t want (+weird laptop-like compromises for thinness), the mac mini is too small for actual HP, and the mac pro cost a ton
  - alexvoda 5y ago
    I believe we are most likely going to see a Mac Mini Pro or the return of the Trashcan Mac Pro instead of a tower Mac Pro. Replicating the capabilities of the Mac Pro with would require another model of M1 and for the volumes the Mac Pro sells I do not believe developing a dedicated lithography mask makes sense. Besides, most of the unique capabilities of the Mac Pro are divergent with vision of the M1: - PCIe slots, there are no GPUs compatible with Arm Mac and some of the functionality of the Afterburner card has been integrated into the M1 Max - Lots of RAM, as seen with the lower RAM models of Mac Book (Air) Apple is increasingly relying on swapping to the fast SSD.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
That... is not how CPUs work, despite Apple's promises. As mentioned, there is a need of an interconnect between those sockets. Power usage aside, it is absolute hell to get it to efficiently and quickly send data between cores. Adding a socket interconnect will destroy the performance of any task that needs to send data between those cores. So, what you're left with, is a 64 core M1. Which is still going to be less efficient than a Threadripper, an EPYC or even a Xeon (and that's quite sad) at multithreaded tasks, and, knowing Apple, about twice as expensive.

Groxx 5y ago

I managed to get the M1 fans running pretty enthusiastically with my first attempt: doing a normal build in a monorepo :| But performance, even with half the ram, was still stellar. Everything remains speedy, even when it's doing far too much.

DSingularity 5y ago

They will skip desktop and ship server chips. If the trends hold, they will have TCO savings which no cloud provider can resist.

RealityVoid 5y ago
I keep hearing this on HN and I do not buy it. The initial cost is much much greater than the competition and even at lower power draw, I don't see it being competitive. And I don't think Apple would even want to be competitive in this segment.
Zababa 5y ago
I know that AWS already have their own ARM chips: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/. I don't know about chips enough to understand how large is the gap between AWS and Apple when it comes to designing chips though.
- BackBlast 5y ago
  I run arm servers in production. M1 performance core performance is about 3x graviton 2 and 2.5x ampere ultra in our stack. The efficiency core is about 0.6 graviton and a bit less than half ampere. Would love to have reasonably costed m1 instances but the value play for us is ampere.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing that.
littlecranky67 5y ago
Apple will not enter the server chip market, hell Apple is not even selling any B2B products, and Jobs was always very vocal about how he doesn't like B2B.

kllrnohj 5y ago

> They could do something gnarly like fit 8 sockets on a single board Those sockets need to communicate with each other, and extremely quickly. And that I/O is very, very expensive in terms of power. Even with that you still end up with poor performance scaling, especially with anything that isn't numa aware (which almost nothing is) So no, that extrapolation doesn't make sense. But even ignoring that missing cost, 8x M1 Max's would be ~800w, give or take. That would work in a Mac Pro replacement, but that'd still be a significant power increase over many of the existing models.

fulafel 5y ago
Interesting idea about the power usage of the interconnect. I don't remember this being discussed as an issue in tech press writings about multisocket Xeon or EPYC systems. Do you happen to have any references?
- mlyle 5y ago
  https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13124/IF%20Power%20EPYC.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13124/IF%20Power%20EPYC.pn... Here's EPYC 7601's "IF" power (it's really all the uncore power) vs. the core power. Going outside the chip means swinging lots of capacitance up and down, and modern interconnects swing that capacitance fast.
  - sroussey 5y ago
    Also why pci 4 and 5 require much more cooling for more than the cpu.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    And that's only for a 2p setup. An 8p setup would need even more interconnects per CPU depending on the architecture (eg, ring, mesh, etc..), which would have further impacts to performance depending on which tradeoffs are made.

ksec 5y ago

>a rebirth of the G4 Cube as a “Mac Mini Pro” That will be one of those shut up and take my money moment. Given how they have been going retro or paying tribute to past design in their recent new product lineup I am hoping a G4 Cube revival is actually within a possibility.

nikanj 5y ago
Apple has been on a weird spree of ”hey what if we listened to our customers”. Maybe they’ll add in the ”normal” desktop computer. The iMac comes with a screen I don’t want (+weird laptop-like compromises for thinness), the mac mini is too small for actual HP, and the mac pro cost a ton
- alexvoda 5y ago
  I believe we are most likely going to see a Mac Mini Pro or the return of the Trashcan Mac Pro instead of a tower Mac Pro. Replicating the capabilities of the Mac Pro with would require another model of M1 and for the volumes the Mac Pro sells I do not believe developing a dedicated lithography mask makes sense. Besides, most of the unique capabilities of the Mac Pro are divergent with vision of the M1: - PCIe slots, there are no GPUs compatible with Arm Mac and some of the functionality of the Afterburner card has been integrated into the M1 Max - Lots of RAM, as seen with the lower RAM models of Mac Book (Air) Apple is increasingly relying on swapping to the fast SSD.

ohgodplsno 5y ago

That... is not how CPUs work, despite Apple's promises. As mentioned, there is a need of an interconnect between those sockets. Power usage aside, it is absolute hell to get it to efficiently and quickly send data between cores. Adding a socket interconnect will destroy the performance of any task that needs to send data between those cores. So, what you're left with, is a 64 core M1. Which is still going to be less efficient than a Threadripper, an EPYC or even a Xeon (and that's quite sad) at multithreaded tasks, and, knowing Apple, about twice as expensive.