4 ms·

> I don't see a rational reason why Tim Cook would read your pitch and greenlight a project like that. Why not? Even just Apple's internal expense could justif

by re-thc 3y ago

> I don't see a rational reason why Tim Cook would read your pitch and greenlight a project like that. Why not? Even just Apple's internal expense could justify it - for the same reason Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc all dog food their own cloud. Apple currently pays AWS, Akamai, Cloudflare, etc lots of $$$. As the current focus is to expand on services and managed offerings you would focus on controlling such a cost (as is typical Apple). > 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. Is the market full of people that only use 4 cores? If that was really the case AWS would have closed shop already instead of being the market leader. It's not like Oracle doesn't charge you for anything else. > Apple kinda got their lunch ate by Nvidia's Grace server And where is Grace? Which cloud currently? It doesn't work that way. If all you think about a server and its ecosystem is hardware then lots of Android phones have better hardware than iphone e.g. in screens, battery life, etc. Was that really the deciding factor? No. I mean by your logic, AMD's EPYC has been winning Intel Xeon's by years. Has Xeon been decimated? No. There's still room for both. AMD can't even produce enough. Considering Apple can exclusive lock TSMC down for a year on bleeding edge, who can really compete if Apple was in?

qwytw 3y ago
> Is the market full of people that only use 4 cores Ampere CPUs on Oracle, Hetzner and (I assume?) Azure are still remarkable cheap compared to Intel/AMD if they are sufficient for your workflows. I'm not sure if the margins in this market are high enough for Apple to enter it and they would probably still have issues scaling production capacity if they are serious about it.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > Ampere CPUs on Oracle, Hetzner and (I assume?) Azure are still remarkable cheap compared to Intel/AMD if they are sufficient for your workflows. Hetzner has always been there. It didn't impact Intel/AMD use cases. There are lots of cheap providers (since the start of time) and I doubt that's the space Apple would ever get into.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    It's just not a market Apple can infiltrate. If Apple wants to compete on the high-end, they have to dethrone Nvidia and their current high-performance ARM servers (H100 clusters and whatnot). That is a suicide mission for Apple or any company really, regardless of the money they have on-hand. So... who would they be selling to, now? I genuinely think such a "server Mac" would echo the Xserve without a fundamental shift in the way Apple treats the software community.
    - re-thc 3y ago
      > It's just not a market Apple can infiltrate. If Apple wants to compete on the high-end, they have to dethrone Nvidia and their current high-performance ARM servers (H100 clusters and whatnot). Why? And why is it only about hardware? So AWS, GCP and Azure all run Intel/AMD, who do they need to dethrone? For all it matters Apple "cloud" could even use these nVidia servers themselves. Not like AWS only uses Graviton. So, so? > So... who would they be selling to, now? I genuinely think such a "server Mac" would echo the Xserve without a fundamental shift in the way Apple treats the software community. Right, why would they only do hardware? As is typical Apple the $ is in the ecosystem and services. The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others. The macbook pro was always more expensive and yet people still purchase them.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        > The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others You are just back around to describing Xserve again. Regardless of whether it is software or hardware-based, an Apple Cloud has no upsell in today's market. That's why Xserve died, and it's why it would die again.
      - qwytw 3y ago
        > The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others. The macbook pro was always more expensive and yet people still purchase them. Which is both less relevant and quite different for enterprise services than consumer products. It's also not that obvious that Apple has a lot of expertise in this area and could provide something better than AWS/Azure/etc.. and Apple is not exactly the company which is willing to compete on lower margins.
jbverschoor 3y ago
The WAS multi-billion contract ends this or next year. Apple cloud is imo one of the easiest ways for them to grow. It's not coincidental that they're working hard on VirtualizationKit etc. Biggest problem would be production of chips
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > Biggest problem would be production of chips I would actually argue that is the easy part. Apple already has access to cutting-edge nodes if they want to pay for them. The hard part is designing a server chip from Apple Silicon, a decidedly mobile SOC. For instance; what if Apple wanted to ship a system that competes with a DGX GH200? Where would you even start with something like the M2 Ultra? - You would either need more cores per SOC, or more SOCs per chipset to match a DGX system - Custom memory controllers are a must (running them at regular speeds depends on how much bandwidth is left) - PCI would need to exposed on-hardware and supported in MacOS, Linux and third-party software - An multi-instance interconnect like Infiniband would need to be working and attractive (as well as a CUDA translator, if they want any hope) And that's just what they would need to match the high-performance ARM industry right now. If they wanted to compete or knock Nvidia's block off, it would take a lot more investment, time and attitude-changing.
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    You don’t need that to run most cloud services, and where most of the profits come from at this point for aws/azure

by re-thc 3y ago

qwytw 3y ago

> Is the market full of people that only use 4 cores Ampere CPUs on Oracle, Hetzner and (I assume?) Azure are still remarkable cheap compared to Intel/AMD if they are sufficient for your workflows. I'm not sure if the margins in this market are high enough for Apple to enter it and they would probably still have issues scaling production capacity if they are serious about it.

re-thc 3y ago
> Ampere CPUs on Oracle, Hetzner and (I assume?) Azure are still remarkable cheap compared to Intel/AMD if they are sufficient for your workflows. Hetzner has always been there. It didn't impact Intel/AMD use cases. There are lots of cheap providers (since the start of time) and I doubt that's the space Apple would ever get into.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  It's just not a market Apple can infiltrate. If Apple wants to compete on the high-end, they have to dethrone Nvidia and their current high-performance ARM servers (H100 clusters and whatnot). That is a suicide mission for Apple or any company really, regardless of the money they have on-hand. So... who would they be selling to, now? I genuinely think such a "server Mac" would echo the Xserve without a fundamental shift in the way Apple treats the software community.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > It's just not a market Apple can infiltrate. If Apple wants to compete on the high-end, they have to dethrone Nvidia and their current high-performance ARM servers (H100 clusters and whatnot). Why? And why is it only about hardware? So AWS, GCP and Azure all run Intel/AMD, who do they need to dethrone? For all it matters Apple "cloud" could even use these nVidia servers themselves. Not like AWS only uses Graviton. So, so? > So... who would they be selling to, now? I genuinely think such a "server Mac" would echo the Xserve without a fundamental shift in the way Apple treats the software community. Right, why would they only do hardware? As is typical Apple the $ is in the ecosystem and services. The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others. The macbook pro was always more expensive and yet people still purchase them.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others You are just back around to describing Xserve again. Regardless of whether it is software or hardware-based, an Apple Cloud has no upsell in today's market. That's why Xserve died, and it's why it would die again.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > The competition would be to offer cloud services that has a better experience just like they do for phones and others. The macbook pro was always more expensive and yet people still purchase them. Which is both less relevant and quite different for enterprise services than consumer products. It's also not that obvious that Apple has a lot of expertise in this area and could provide something better than AWS/Azure/etc.. and Apple is not exactly the company which is willing to compete on lower margins.

jbverschoor 3y ago

The WAS multi-billion contract ends this or next year. Apple cloud is imo one of the easiest ways for them to grow. It's not coincidental that they're working hard on VirtualizationKit etc. Biggest problem would be production of chips

smoldesu 3y ago
> Biggest problem would be production of chips I would actually argue that is the easy part. Apple already has access to cutting-edge nodes if they want to pay for them. The hard part is designing a server chip from Apple Silicon, a decidedly mobile SOC. For instance; what if Apple wanted to ship a system that competes with a DGX GH200? Where would you even start with something like the M2 Ultra? - You would either need more cores per SOC, or more SOCs per chipset to match a DGX system - Custom memory controllers are a must (running them at regular speeds depends on how much bandwidth is left) - PCI would need to exposed on-hardware and supported in MacOS, Linux and third-party software - An multi-instance interconnect like Infiniband would need to be working and attractive (as well as a CUDA translator, if they want any hope) And that's just what they would need to match the high-performance ARM industry right now. If they wanted to compete or knock Nvidia's block off, it would take a lot more investment, time and attitude-changing.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  You don’t need that to run most cloud services, and where most of the profits come from at this point for aws/azure