4 ms·

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 tha

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.

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.