5 ms·

For those hoping for an M1 based server, this is the definitive signal that will not happen.

KptMarchewa 5y ago
Does that really matter? There are really good ARM processors right now, and biggest advantages of M1 - power efficiency - really matter more on the desktop than on server.
- cush 5y ago
  It's exactly the opposite. A reduction in power can save millions of dollars in energy and cooling. All of the constraints and challenges of building a desktop are scaled up. This doesn't even factor in the savings in space. Real estate isn't cheap.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  A small, power efficient and quiet home server is something I’d love - extra points if the power supply is built in. I’ve tried a lot of Intel Nucs and they come close. The Nuc9 especially so, as it fits PCI cards.
  - eli 5y ago
    A Mac Mini running regular MacOS doesn't fit the bill?
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      It’s close and the 10gb networking makes it attractive. However it maxes out at 16gb ram (a Nuc 9 goes to 64) and virtualisation isn’t quite there yet I don’t think. Fusion says it supports the M1 but I don’t get good results. I’d like esxi or Proxmox on it, but could learn to live with it as is I suppose. Running a GUI when headless seems a bit crazy.
      - dijit 5y ago
        > Running a GUI when headless seems a bit crazy. There's many hundreds of thousands of windows servers that run a GUI. Not saying I like it; but, it's a thing and nobody seems to care that much.
  - lazyier 5y ago
    I have about 5 ARM-based systems running in my house right now. None of them are Apple. This is what I use for my file server: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4 Runs Debian (Armbian). Provides file shares over SMB, Syncthing, S3 (Minio). Also does some monitoring of other systems via Prometheus scraping of node-exporter. Everything except Samba runs in containers. With two mirrored 6TB HDDs it has no problem keeping up with the household 1GbE network. Quad A55 cores, 4GB with Zram and it has all the power I need.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      Oh wow. Thanks for this.
    - brimble 5y ago
      After messing with some RPis and Odroids, I went the other way and just got a single used Lenovo workstation off Ebay. After a memory upgrade (with ECC) and adding an SSD for the system disk, it was about $200, or about the same as fully outfitting two higher-end RPi4s. Easily runs a half-dozen dockerized services, with capacity to spare, and takes care of a bunch of ZFS-formatted, mirrored, spinning rust internal hard drives (ZFS on USB disks is... not fun). It can't live-transcode video above about 720p without stuttering, but then, most of those ARM boards can't either, so I just have to make sure whatever client I'm using can handle native formats for all my media. Not sure how it is on power use, but I much prefer managing all that stuff on one machine.
      - lazyier 5y ago
        Typically I like to use my old laptops as "servers". They usually get dropped or ran over or screen hinges broken or something like that. Long before the actual hardware inside gets a chance to fizzle out. They have a lot of advantages in that they are low power, have built-in UPS, small, have a keyboard and display. The disadvantage is that you don't get a lot of storage options. I have some USB 3 attached storage, but I wanted something a little different this time. Most recently my RPI 4 8GB serving as media server got replaced by my girlfriend's Asus laptop. She knocked it off a table and the corner of the display got smashed in. Now it is running Linux and Kodi, among other things. Can barely see it sitting there under the TV. A bit better at 4K out then RPI 4, but not by a whole lot. Don't do any transcoding on it, though. My "Big Servers" for my home lab are 3 ancient HP 1U rack servers. Built a small horizontal rack so they "hang down" instead of sideways and they take up almost no room. They run some high efficiency Xeon processors so I can get away with running them off of one household outlet. I only leave one on and spin up the other two when I need the extra capacity for some project. Dual socket 8 cores and 72GB of RAM each. Figured out that if you go and look at Vmware hardware support and get a server that is _just_ one generation older then they are willing to support than these things are dirt cheap on the used market. If they can't run the latest version of Vmware then nobody wants them. Linux don't care, of course. I think I spent a total of 600 dollars for all 3 servers, but it could of been a lot less. It's been a while. I hate dealing with server-grade hardware because the lights out stuff is insecure (100% get one with a dedicated LO network port), dealing with firmware configuration is tedious, take forever to boot up, and dealing with the raid controllers is misery. But it's the cheapest way to get a ton of capacity. Especially if you have a project that wants to use IPMI and such things.
- brianwawok 5y ago
  Have you ever looked into colo? The #1 cost is power. You can have a 5U server with lower power usage that is a LOT cheaper than 1U power hog. Obviously at AWS scale this is abstracted away, but I think you are still paying a lot for the power you consume.
  - scns 5y ago
    It ARM instances of AWS are cheaper.
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      Right. Some of that is for CPU cost, but for sure a big chunk of that is power/heat.
  - lazyier 5y ago
    As was mentioned before.. People were using ARM servers before Apple had a ARM desktop. So not being able to specifically use Apple silicon isn't a big deal.
- AaronFriel 5y ago
  It matters for targeting "Apple Silicon" (aka M1, for now) Macs. It's complex to build a binary that works at feature parity on M1. Licensing requirements for VMs and lack of server hardware that can be put in datacenters are both obstacles to target Apple Silicon. Not insurmountable, you can build enclosures for a rack of Mac Studios & Mac Pros and orchestrate VMs with Hypervisor framework, but it's a large enough obstacle that major cloud providers don't offer it and that pushes large costs onto the CI providers, which then get pushed to the folks trying to build tooling that works on M1 Macs. That includes the open source ecosystem. The alternative is cross compilation, either cross-arch or cross-platform or both. All of these options are brittle and complex. Speaking from experience here, I've had to follow issue trackers for: programming language teams shipping parity for M1, major libraries (think of foundational libraries like GRPC's libraries for each language) not yet shipping binaries for M1, and developer tools and OSS teams producing binaries. All of this needs to come together, and it hasn't yet. The whole ecosystem is straining under the weight of this complexity to target engineers' laptops.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    Mac Pros can be ordered in a rack-mountable case.
    - gentle 5y ago
      Uh, huh. They're laughably expensive and not untradable or serviceable in any way.
  - greedo 5y ago
    I guess you don't consider AWS a major cloud provider? https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/ You can choose from either x86 or M1 machines.
    - AaronFriel 5y ago
- aseipp 5y ago
  Operations/watt, which is a function of power efficiency (i.e. how many floating point tera-ops can you do in 1 second), is the primary driving performance criteria and engineering metric for all modern desktop, server, and mobile platforms. There is almost no metric which matters more when it comes to high performance compute. That said, Apple isn't going to sell chips these to anyone else, period. And everyone right now is hustling to match the same levels of efficiency in newer designs, and they'll get there sooner or later. So "Apple Servers" are a completely moot point, but power efficiency? Yes, it literally matters more than ever, across every spectrum of the industry, and it's why the M1 was something people cared about anyway.
david-cako 5y ago
Or a definitive signal that Apple will soon release a fully-managed cloud native solution. :)
- lostlogin 5y ago
  When the words Apple and Cloud come together I start to twitch. It’s done to death that their web services are of dubious quality, and they have got better. However you don’t have to go very deep or use services for very long to find some very sharp edges.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see, but I get the impression that Apple's approach to developing products can lead to very good highs but pretty poor lows considering the amount of money they could easily invest, I would also be somewhat hesitant with an Apple Cloud unless they had something actually new to bring to the market other than basically rent-seeking for people who want to develop (say) CI pipelines for their products.
nicoburns 5y ago
It probably won't happen, but if Apple did want to get into the server market, it would make a lot more sense for them to support linux on their hardware for server use cases than to make their own server software.
NorwegianDude 5y ago
- gumby 5y ago
  When apple sold Xserve the support was excellent. Once I called and they had the guy who wrote the code go into a server room and duplicate an unfinished problem while I was on the phone. If they did go into this business seriously they’d probably do this again. That kind of support doesn’t scale for consumer products.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  Apples xserve was crazy reliable in my limited experience and I know of one in production at this time. Seems unwise, but there you go.
  - gs17 5y ago
    Yeah, I know of a company that was using a first gen xserve up until last year. Something broke and they couldn't get (or couldn't justify the price of) replacement parts, but nearly two decades of use is very impressive.
gumby 5y ago
> this is the definitive signal that will not happen. …that it will not happen via an add-on “server” program. But TBH it’s hard to see how servers could be much of a market for Apple. People use the cloud more than local (“departmental”) servers these days and the cloud back end belongs to Linux, typically with a provider on top (AWS etc). Apple’s strengths lie elsewhere.
- comboy 5y ago
  Plus they don't need to bother, they can just sell server chips now.
  - als0 5y ago
    But Apple sells solutions and experiences, not components. They’re not going to let other OEMs build computers using their chips.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      If they ever do, Valve need to send Tim Cook a really nicely worded email, Steam Deck with an Mx chip in it would be excellent.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Does that really matter? There are really good ARM processors right now, and biggest advantages of M1 - power efficiency - really matter more on the desktop than on server.

cush 5y ago
It's exactly the opposite. A reduction in power can save millions of dollars in energy and cooling. All of the constraints and challenges of building a desktop are scaled up. This doesn't even factor in the savings in space. Real estate isn't cheap.
lostlogin 5y ago
A small, power efficient and quiet home server is something I’d love - extra points if the power supply is built in. I’ve tried a lot of Intel Nucs and they come close. The Nuc9 especially so, as it fits PCI cards.
- eli 5y ago
  A Mac Mini running regular MacOS doesn't fit the bill?
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    It’s close and the 10gb networking makes it attractive. However it maxes out at 16gb ram (a Nuc 9 goes to 64) and virtualisation isn’t quite there yet I don’t think. Fusion says it supports the M1 but I don’t get good results. I’d like esxi or Proxmox on it, but could learn to live with it as is I suppose. Running a GUI when headless seems a bit crazy.
    - dijit 5y ago
      > Running a GUI when headless seems a bit crazy. There's many hundreds of thousands of windows servers that run a GUI. Not saying I like it; but, it's a thing and nobody seems to care that much.
- lazyier 5y ago
  I have about 5 ARM-based systems running in my house right now. None of them are Apple. This is what I use for my file server: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc4 Runs Debian (Armbian). Provides file shares over SMB, Syncthing, S3 (Minio). Also does some monitoring of other systems via Prometheus scraping of node-exporter. Everything except Samba runs in containers. With two mirrored 6TB HDDs it has no problem keeping up with the household 1GbE network. Quad A55 cores, 4GB with Zram and it has all the power I need.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    Oh wow. Thanks for this.
  - brimble 5y ago
    After messing with some RPis and Odroids, I went the other way and just got a single used Lenovo workstation off Ebay. After a memory upgrade (with ECC) and adding an SSD for the system disk, it was about $200, or about the same as fully outfitting two higher-end RPi4s. Easily runs a half-dozen dockerized services, with capacity to spare, and takes care of a bunch of ZFS-formatted, mirrored, spinning rust internal hard drives (ZFS on USB disks is... not fun). It can't live-transcode video above about 720p without stuttering, but then, most of those ARM boards can't either, so I just have to make sure whatever client I'm using can handle native formats for all my media. Not sure how it is on power use, but I much prefer managing all that stuff on one machine.
    - lazyier 5y ago
      Typically I like to use my old laptops as "servers". They usually get dropped or ran over or screen hinges broken or something like that. Long before the actual hardware inside gets a chance to fizzle out. They have a lot of advantages in that they are low power, have built-in UPS, small, have a keyboard and display. The disadvantage is that you don't get a lot of storage options. I have some USB 3 attached storage, but I wanted something a little different this time. Most recently my RPI 4 8GB serving as media server got replaced by my girlfriend's Asus laptop. She knocked it off a table and the corner of the display got smashed in. Now it is running Linux and Kodi, among other things. Can barely see it sitting there under the TV. A bit better at 4K out then RPI 4, but not by a whole lot. Don't do any transcoding on it, though. My "Big Servers" for my home lab are 3 ancient HP 1U rack servers. Built a small horizontal rack so they "hang down" instead of sideways and they take up almost no room. They run some high efficiency Xeon processors so I can get away with running them off of one household outlet. I only leave one on and spin up the other two when I need the extra capacity for some project. Dual socket 8 cores and 72GB of RAM each. Figured out that if you go and look at Vmware hardware support and get a server that is _just_ one generation older then they are willing to support than these things are dirt cheap on the used market. If they can't run the latest version of Vmware then nobody wants them. Linux don't care, of course. I think I spent a total of 600 dollars for all 3 servers, but it could of been a lot less. It's been a while. I hate dealing with server-grade hardware because the lights out stuff is insecure (100% get one with a dedicated LO network port), dealing with firmware configuration is tedious, take forever to boot up, and dealing with the raid controllers is misery. But it's the cheapest way to get a ton of capacity. Especially if you have a project that wants to use IPMI and such things.
brianwawok 5y ago
Have you ever looked into colo? The #1 cost is power. You can have a 5U server with lower power usage that is a LOT cheaper than 1U power hog. Obviously at AWS scale this is abstracted away, but I think you are still paying a lot for the power you consume.
- scns 5y ago
  It ARM instances of AWS are cheaper.
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    Right. Some of that is for CPU cost, but for sure a big chunk of that is power/heat.
- lazyier 5y ago
  As was mentioned before.. People were using ARM servers before Apple had a ARM desktop. So not being able to specifically use Apple silicon isn't a big deal.
AaronFriel 5y ago
It matters for targeting "Apple Silicon" (aka M1, for now) Macs. It's complex to build a binary that works at feature parity on M1. Licensing requirements for VMs and lack of server hardware that can be put in datacenters are both obstacles to target Apple Silicon. Not insurmountable, you can build enclosures for a rack of Mac Studios & Mac Pros and orchestrate VMs with Hypervisor framework, but it's a large enough obstacle that major cloud providers don't offer it and that pushes large costs onto the CI providers, which then get pushed to the folks trying to build tooling that works on M1 Macs. That includes the open source ecosystem. The alternative is cross compilation, either cross-arch or cross-platform or both. All of these options are brittle and complex. Speaking from experience here, I've had to follow issue trackers for: programming language teams shipping parity for M1, major libraries (think of foundational libraries like GRPC's libraries for each language) not yet shipping binaries for M1, and developer tools and OSS teams producing binaries. All of this needs to come together, and it hasn't yet. The whole ecosystem is straining under the weight of this complexity to target engineers' laptops.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Mac Pros can be ordered in a rack-mountable case.
  - gentle 5y ago
    Uh, huh. They're laughably expensive and not untradable or serviceable in any way.
- greedo 5y ago
  I guess you don't consider AWS a major cloud provider? https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/ You can choose from either x86 or M1 machines.
  - AaronFriel 5y ago
aseipp 5y ago
Operations/watt, which is a function of power efficiency (i.e. how many floating point tera-ops can you do in 1 second), is the primary driving performance criteria and engineering metric for all modern desktop, server, and mobile platforms. There is almost no metric which matters more when it comes to high performance compute. That said, Apple isn't going to sell chips these to anyone else, period. And everyone right now is hustling to match the same levels of efficiency in newer designs, and they'll get there sooner or later. So "Apple Servers" are a completely moot point, but power efficiency? Yes, it literally matters more than ever, across every spectrum of the industry, and it's why the M1 was something people cared about anyway.

david-cako 5y ago

Or a definitive signal that Apple will soon release a fully-managed cloud native solution. :)

lostlogin 5y ago
When the words Apple and Cloud come together I start to twitch. It’s done to death that their web services are of dubious quality, and they have got better. However you don’t have to go very deep or use services for very long to find some very sharp edges.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see, but I get the impression that Apple's approach to developing products can lead to very good highs but pretty poor lows considering the amount of money they could easily invest, I would also be somewhat hesitant with an Apple Cloud unless they had something actually new to bring to the market other than basically rent-seeking for people who want to develop (say) CI pipelines for their products.

nicoburns 5y ago

It probably won't happen, but if Apple did want to get into the server market, it would make a lot more sense for them to support linux on their hardware for server use cases than to make their own server software.

NorwegianDude 5y ago

gumby 5y ago
When apple sold Xserve the support was excellent. Once I called and they had the guy who wrote the code go into a server room and duplicate an unfinished problem while I was on the phone. If they did go into this business seriously they’d probably do this again. That kind of support doesn’t scale for consumer products.
lostlogin 5y ago
Apples xserve was crazy reliable in my limited experience and I know of one in production at this time. Seems unwise, but there you go.
- gs17 5y ago
  Yeah, I know of a company that was using a first gen xserve up until last year. Something broke and they couldn't get (or couldn't justify the price of) replacement parts, but nearly two decades of use is very impressive.

gumby 5y ago

> this is the definitive signal that will not happen. …that it will not happen via an add-on “server” program. But TBH it’s hard to see how servers could be much of a market for Apple. People use the cloud more than local (“departmental”) servers these days and the cloud back end belongs to Linux, typically with a provider on top (AWS etc). Apple’s strengths lie elsewhere.

comboy 5y ago
Plus they don't need to bother, they can just sell server chips now.
- als0 5y ago
  But Apple sells solutions and experiences, not components. They’re not going to let other OEMs build computers using their chips.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    If they ever do, Valve need to send Tim Cook a really nicely worded email, Steam Deck with an Mx chip in it would be excellent.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]