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ARM’s Neoverse N2: Cortex A710 for Servers
- lockhouse 3y agoDear Tim Cook, I have an idea for Apple's next great product. Bring back Xserves, but with M-series processors in them this time. Then hire the Asahi Linux developers and get Linux running very solidly on them. Make it so you can buy them with either macOS or Linux pre-installed. Sincerely, lockhouse
- whitepoplar 3y agoor just offer the hardware exclusively on Apple Cloud.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt's likely they already have a bare bones version of linux running solidly in house.
- monocasa 3y agoI've heard solid rumors that they do have their own internal linux distro, specifically so the hardware teams can do bringup without a dependency on the XNU team(s). That Linux distro is also supposed to be kind of a shit show held together with bubblegum and paperclips, in contrast to asahi which is bending over backwards to do things right (gods bless them).
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoTo be fair, if it's only for hardware bring up then I would kind of expect it to to be hacked together without any regard for things you care about in a "real" distro. (Heavily patched kernel? Who cares, we're not going to update it. Can't self-host? Whatever, cross compile the whole thing. Software leaks memory? No problem, just reboot the test rig hourly. Broken package manager? We can build+flash a new image every time we want to change the installed software.)
- baq 3y agoThere’s a slight problem with this approach - you can’t trust your test results in such environment… if you manage to complete your test suites at all before the next revision drops.
- 221qqwe 3y ago> in contrast to asahi which is bending over backwards to do things right Not having to reverse engineer drivers for pretty much every single component would probably require a fraction of the effort though. And it's not like Apple would really need to actually maintain their own distro, releasing the drivers (which they are more than capabable of doing) would be perfectly sufficient.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smoldesu 3y agoA little late now that Ampere and Nvidia have their entries in the game. Pushing for Apple hardware in the server rack would probably end the same way it did the first time. It would take a cultural shift for Apple to align themselves with the server market.
- lockhouse 3y agoGiven that there are several brands of Mac mini server rack mount kits on the market, clearly there is a demand for Apple hardware in the server room. If nothing else they would be a nice alternative to rack mount Mac Pros for a build farm. I would think the performance per watt would be very competitive with other server vendors on the market as well.
- smoldesu 3y agoThey fill a niche, and so did Xserve. It had an accompanying software suite that was fully fleshed out to an Apple user's likings. The biggest gap right now (afaik) is Apple's virtualization limits. Regardless of the cores in your system, any Mac can host no more than 2 instances of MacOS. It's a huge kneecap to how Macs can be used as a server, and a death-blow to any serious hosting company that wants to provision them as a virtual resource. > I would think the performance per watt would be very competitive with other server vendors on the market as well. I can go get a 4 core Ampere ARM instance for free. The market goes so much cheaper than Apple's CPUs it's not even funny. Performance-wise, Apple kinda got their lunch ate by Nvidia's Grace server. There isn't really a demand to fill for high-performance ARM computing, and the cheap end goes so cheap that Apple can't even touch them. I see two ways for Apple to escape this: 1. They can double-down on their ecosystem investments to create a "CUDA-killer" and accompanying hardware, spending tens-of-billions of dollars across multiple years to obsolete Nvidia's industry ties. 2. Initiate or join an Open Source pact to write a CUDA replacement or translator a-la Vulkan/DXVK that gives vendors no choice but to abandon Nvidia. Of course, the easier play is to just pretend all of this is beneath you and continue building your current ecosystem. It's what I would do, and I don't see a rational reason why Tim Cook would read your pitch and greenlight a project like that.
- re-thc 3y agoI look forward to the day when AKS is assumed to be Apple and not Azure.
- pjmlp 3y agoBetter get a chair to wait on.
- pier25 3y agoRisc-v is already coming for the data center and Apple have their hands full.
- 221qqwe 3y agoI'm still betting on Intel bringing back Itanium. Cause why not.. having more architectures (for no apparent reasons) sounds cool.
- sbuk 3y agoRISC-V is at-best 10-15 years away from being in the position to where ARM is now.
- ekianjo 3y agoI have no insights about this but Jim Keller disagrees with that statement
- hashtag-til 3y agoJK got vested interested in such a wishful thinking statement. I take it as marketing and not engineering.
- sbuk 3y agoJim Keller is someone to pay attention to, but as a sibling says, JK has a commercial IP interest, which means the touted openness advantage could easily be lost. This insight comes from people who have consulted for organisations like Tenstorrent and SambaNova and both companies focussed on designing for HPC and AI. General-purpose consumer computing platform (i.e. servers, desktops and laptops) is yet to be forthcoming from anyone in the space, and they are a way off.
- pjmlp 3y agoXserve and A/UX hardly had anything to offer over other UNIX on the server. Likewise Apple also had their own Linux distribution that went nowhere, MkLinux.
- inkyoto 3y ago> Likewise Apple also had their own Linux distribution that went nowhere, MkLinux. MkLinux (MicroKernel Linux) was not a distribution but a modified Linux kernel to be loaded as a Mach server to run under CMU (later OSF) Mach 3. It abstracted idiosyncrasises of the Apple NuBus and peripherals away from the Linux kernel that did not (or could not altogether) support – the NuBus itself and the NuBus attached devices. The distribution was a stock RedHat v4 or v5. Amusingly, despite CMU Mach 3 being a µ-kernel, there was nothing «micro» about the size of its own binary, and – off the top of my head – the Mach binary size was larger than that of the vmlinuz at the time.
- pjmlp 3y agoIt was still a distribution, the Linux kernel packaged alongside whatever else is necessary to make it work in an usable operating system. If anything, it was actually pity it didn't took off, as its design was quite interesting.
- devnullbrain 3y agoDear lockhouse, What does any of this have to do with Neoverse?
- mhh__ 3y agoWell apple chips are Arm but better so...
- jgalt212 3y agoAre Dell or HP selling ARM servers to the general public, or still only to the cloud providers?
- samcat116 3y agoHP is
- hashtag-til 3y agoWorth having a look on the Lenovo x13s as well.
- qwytw 3y agoSamsung, Dell and HP are also selling Qualcomm Windows laptops. Why (besides the novelty factor) would anyone get one instead of an Intel/AMD/Apple laptops is beyond me though..
- hashtag-til 3y agoBattery life is a major factor. Windows is not really my thing for many years, so Apple is on the table in the battery life requirement, but I don’t think I’m coming back to Intel/AMD soon.
- pjmlp 3y agoApparently those ARM based applications don't write themselves.
- als0 3y agoIndeed. It's an Ampere chip inside a ProLiant Gen11 https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/hpe_arm_proliant_servers/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/hpe_arm_proliant_serv...
- semi-extrinsic 3y agoHP, at least, doesn't seem to want to sell any type of server to anyone. I recently tried to configure a Proliant DL385 Gen11, in order to give my sales rep a coherent list of "this is what I want" in terms of CPUs, memory and disks. And let me tell you, it's a sales experience that might just as well be a Monty Python sketch, it's so bad. I mean literally, one of their subdomains had a certificate expired so that I had to add a security exception just to view the information. The page in question had select boxes that couldn't be scrolled, anything I did would just scroll the main page instead. Their other configurator (because ofc they need at least two different ones) was completely unusable, when you try to select a drive or something you get an explosion of recursive "to select that you also need to select this cable kit, one of those 4 cages and deselect that other thing" warnings. Like, if you know what to fix, just fix it!!
- kramerger 3y agoDo you people honestly believe we can have a real discussion about CPUs on HN? These posts are always hijacked into an Apple discussion (currently 21 comments out of 23 are in the Apple thread) back to the topic: ARM and AMD CPUs have about the same L1 instruction cache size. But don't they have a very different instruction density, giving one a noticeable advantage over the other?
- 221qqwe 3y ago> These posts are always hijacked into an Apple discussion Or occasionally by RISC-V "enthusiasts" who claim that none of it matters since ARM is dead and everybody is going to switch to RISC-V in the very near (but undetermined) future..
- imtringued 3y agoARM is dead not because I am a RISCV enthusiast, but because ARM is a terrible company that is taking forever to enter the server market. Neoverse N2 chips should have been available years ago. Once Jim Keller releases his Ascalon server RISC-V CPUs that are competitive with Zen x86 server CPUs, there is basically no room for ARM servers left since ARM couldn't manage to get their feet into the server market soon enough. So many ARM server vendors canceled their CPU projects, to the point that the safest prediction you can make about any new ARM server CPU is that it will be canceled. The thing about ARM is that it is already dead in the server market.
- klelatti 3y agoI sense a degree of disappointment, both in the article and in some of the comments here, that Arm hasn’t made more rapid progress in getting competitive server CPUs to market. It’s clearly not the instruction set architecture. I wonder if the problem is that Arm’s business model makes it hard to justify the investment needed given the licensing fees they feel they can charge. My reading between the lines on Nuvia was that Arm was looking to make more on Nuvia cores and providing Nuvia with substantial help. But Qualcomm broke into the party. Happy to be told I’m wrong though.
- rajnathani 3y agoQualcomm helped save Nuvia from the Apple lawsuit though.
- ezconnect 3y agoROB was never defined in that technical article. It is one of the basic of technical writing that it should be defined on first use.
- Matumio 3y agoThey also didn't define DTLB, ALU, or CPU for that matter. I thought it was a good choice. They were assuming deep familiarity with modern CPU architectures through the whole text, so a one-sentence definition of all the terms would either have been too much, or not enough, depending on the reader.
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoIt depends entirely on your audience. There is too much to define in these kinds of articles for it to be practical, it would way more than double the length, which is why it's better to just refer to a computer architecture course.
- MobiusHorizons 3y agoThe point about 52bit vs 48bit address width is interesting. It seems to reflect the fact that both intel and amd are going after the supercomputer market. I’m curious if there are other use cases where such a large address width affects traditional server computing. For instance does it prevent using bits for tagging pointers?