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If Apple supported Linux (headless) natively, and we could rack m4 pros, I absolutely would use them in our Colo. The CPUs have zero competition in terms of sp
by exabrial 2y ago
If Apple supported Linux (headless) natively, and we could rack m4 pros, I absolutely would use them in our Colo.
The CPUs have zero competition in terms of speed, memory bandwidth. Still blown away no other company has been able to produce Arm server chips that can compete.
- notpushkin 2y agoAsahi is a thing. For headless usage it’s pretty much ready to go already.
- criddell 2y agoThe Asahi maintainer resigned recently. What that means for the future only time will tell. I probably wouldn't want to make a big investment in it right now.
- seabrookmx 2y agoYour wording makes it sound like it was a one-man show. Asahi has a really strong contributor base, new leadership[1], and the backing of Fedora via the Asahi Fedora Remix. While Hector resigning is a loss, I don't think it's a death knell for the project. [1]: https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/ https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
- hoppp 2y agoHe was the lead developer and very prominent figure. I think it probably boils down to funding the new developments.
- whimsicalism 2y agoit was pretty close to a one man show
- skyyler 2y agoBy what grounds do you make this statement? My understanding is there are dozens of people working on it.
- whimsicalism 2y agoe: I'm removing this comment because on reflection I think it is probably some form of doxxing and being right on the internet isn't that important.
- ArchOversight 2y agoYou believe that Hector Martin is also Asahi Lina? https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt https://bsky.app/profile/lina.yt https://github.com/AsahiLina https://github.com/AsahiLina
- whimsicalism 2y agoe: snip
- raydev 2y agoI thought this was confirmed a couple years ago.
- notpushkin 2y agoRegardless of whether this is true, there is a lot of other Asahi developers. This fact alone is immaterial.
- surajrmal 2y agoYou make it sound like there was only one.
- lynndotpy 2y agoNot at all for M3 or M4. Support is for M2 and M1 currently.
- EgoIncarnate 2y agoM3 support in Asahi is still heavily WIP. I think it doesn't even have display support, Ethernet, or Wifi yet, I think it's only serial over USB . Without any GPU or ANE support, it's not very useful for AI stuff. https://asahilinux.org/docs/M3-Series-Feature-Support/ https://asahilinux.org/docs/M3-Series-Feature-Support/
- notpushkin 2y agoHmm, this page links to an out-of-tree ANE module (same as on M1/M2 I believe). No GPU support is a bummer, though. On the other hand, you can do without display support if you’re only using it as a server. And I think USB Ethernet dongles might work for the time being?
- WD-42 2y agoIt’s only a thing for the M1. Asahi is a Sisyphean effort to keep up with new hardware and the outlook is pretty grim at the moment. Apple’s whole m.o. is to take FOSS software, repackage it and sell it. They don’t want people using it directly.
- hedora 2y agoThe last I checked, AMD was outperforming Apple perf/dollar on the high end, though they were close on perf/watt for the TDPs where their parts overlapped. I’d be curious to know if this changes that. It’d take a lot more than doubling cores to take out the very high power AMD parts, but this might squeeze them a bit. Interestingly, AMD has also been investing heavily in unified RAM. I wonder if they have / plan an SoC that competes 1:1 with this. (Most of the parts I’m referring to are set up for discrete graphics.)
- aurareturn 2y agoThe M4 Pro is 56% faster in ST performance against AMD’s new Strix Halo while being 3.6x more efficient. Source: https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-AI-Max-395-Analysis-Strix-Halo-to-rival-Apple-M4-Pro-Max-with-16-Zen-5-cores-and-iGPU-on-par-with-RTX-4070-Laptop.963274.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-AI-Max-395-Analysis-... Cinebench 2024 results.
- hedora 2y agoThat’s a laptop part, so it makes different tradeoffs. Somewhere on the internet there is a tdp wattage vs performance x-y plot. There’s a pareto optimal region where all the apple and amd parts live. Apple owns low tdp, AMD owns high tdp. They duke it out in the middle. Intel is nowhere close to the line. I’d guess someone has made one that includes datacenter ARM, but I’ve never seen it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aurareturn 2y agoHigh TDP? You mean server-grade CPUs? Apple doesn't make those.
- derefr 2y agoTrue, but these "Ultra" chips do target the same niche as (some) high-TDP chips. Workstations (like the Mac Studio) have traditionally been a space where "enthusiast"-grade consumer parts (think Threadripper) and actual server parts competed. The owner of a workstation didn't usually care about their machine's TDP; they just cared that it could chew through their workloads as quickly as possible. But, unlike an actual server, workstations didn't need the super-high core count required for multitenant parallelism; and would go idle for long stretches — thus benefitting (though not requiring) more-efficient power management that could drive down baseline TDP.
- hoppp 2y agoWhat about serviceability? These come with soldered in ssd? That would be an issue for server use, Its too expensive to throw it away all for a broken ssd.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoNah, in many businesses, everything is on a schedule. For desktop computers, a common cycle is 4 years. For servers, maybe a little longer, but not by much. After that date arrives, it’s liquidate everything and rebuild. Having things consistently work is much cheaper than down days caused by your ancient equipment. Apple’s SSDs will make it to 5 years no problem - and more likely, 10-15 years.
- hedora 2y agoAt my last N jobs, companies built high end server farms and carefully specced all the hardware. Then they looked at SSD specs and said “these are all fine”. Fast forward 2 years: The $50-$250K machines have a 100% drive failure rate, and some poor bastard has to fly from data center to data center to swap the $60 drive for a $120 one, then re-rack and re-image each machine. Anyway, soldering a decent SSD to the motherboard board would actually improve reliability at all those places.
- olyjohn 2y agoWhat does soldering it to the board have to do with reliability? If they were soldered onto those systems you talk about, all those would have had to be replaced instead of just having the drive swapped out and re-imaged.
- wtallis 2y agoI think the implication was that a soldered SSD doesn't give the customer as much chance to pick the wrong SSD. But it's still possible for the customer to have a different use case in mind than the OEM did when the OEM is picking what SSD to include.
- PaulHoule 2y agoIf I read this right, the r8g.48xlarge at AMZN [1] has 192 cores and 1536GB which exceeds the M3 Ultra in some metrics. It reminds me of the 1990s when my old school was using Sun machines based on the 68k series and later SPARC and we were blown away with the toaster-sized HP PA RISC machine that was used for student work for all the CS classes. Then Linux came out and it was clear the 386 trashed them all in terms of value and as we got the 486 and 586 and further generations, the Intel architecture trashed them in every respect. The story then was that Intel was making more parts than anybody else so nobody else could afford to keep up the investment. The same is happening with parts for phones and TSMC's manufacturing dominance -- and today with chiplets you can build up things like the M3 Ultra out of smaller parts. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/r8g/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/r8g/
- hedora 2y agoIn fairness, the sun and dec boxes I used back then (up to about 1999) could hold their own against intel machines. Then, one day, we built a 5 machine amd athlon xp linux cluster for $2000 ($400/machine) that beat all the unix and windows server hardware by at least 10x on $/perf. It’s nice that we have more than one viable cpu vendor these days, though it seems like there’s only one viable fab company.
- PaulHoule 2y agoIn 1998-1999 I had a DEC Alpha on my desktop that was really impressive, it was a 64-bit machine a few years before you could get a 64-bit Athlon.
- hedora 2y agoYeah. For what we needed, five 32 bit address spaces was enough DRAM. The individual CPU parts were way more than 20% as fast, and the 100Mbit switch was good enough. (The data basically fit in ram, so network transport time to load a machine was bounded by 4GiB / 8MiB / sec = 500 seconds. Also, the hard disks weren’t much faster than network back then.)
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- icecube123 2y agoYea ive been thinking about this for a few years. The Mx series’s chip would sell into data centers like crazy if apple went after that market. Especially if they created a server tuned chip. It could probably be their 2nd biggest product line behind the iphone. The performance and efficiency is awesome. I guess it would be meat to see some web serving and database benchmarks to really know.
- kridsdale1 2y agoTSMC couldn’t make enough at the leading node in addition to all the iPhone chips Apple has to sell. There’s a physical thoughput limit. That’s why this isn’t M4.
- Apofis 2y agoDoesn't MacOS support these things? I'm sure Apple runs these on their datacenters somehow?
- rbanffy 2y ago> The CPUs have zero competition in terms of speed, memory bandwidth. Maybe not at the same power consumption, but I'm sure mid-range Xeons and EPYCs mop the floor with the M3 Ultra in CPU performance. What the M3 Ultra has that nobody else comes close is a decent GPU near a pool of half a terabyte of RAM.
- Thaxll 2y agoApple does not make server CPUs, they make consumer low W CPUs, it's very different. FYI Apple runs Linux in their DC, so no Apple hardware in their own servers.
- alwillis 2y ago> Apple does not make server CPUs, they make consumer low W CPUs, it's very different. This is silly. Given the performance per watt, the M series would be great in a data center. As you all know, electricity for running the servers and cooling for the servers are the two biggest ongoing costs for a data center; the M series requires less power and runs more efficiently than the average Intel or AMD-based server. > FYI Apple runs Linux in their DC, so no Apple hardware in their own servers. That's certainly no longer the case. Apple announced their Private Cloud Compute [1] initiative—Apple designed servers running Apple Silicon to support Apple Intelligence functions that can't run on-device. BTW, Apple just announced a $500 billion investment [2] in US-based manufacturing, including a 250,000 square foot facility to make servers. Yes, these will obviously be for their Private Cloud Compute servers… but it doesn't have to be only for that purpose. From the press release: As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs. Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center. Teams at Apple designed the servers to be incredibly energy efficient, reducing the energy demands of Apple data centers — which already run on 100 percent renewable energy. As Apple brings Apple Intelligence to customers across the U.S., it also plans to continue expanding data center capacity in North Carolina, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada. [1]: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ [2]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more-than-500-billion-usd-in-the-us-over-the-next-four-years/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...
- astrange 2y agoThe interesting difference between x86 and ARM is security, not performance, btw.
- ngneer 2y agoHardly. x86 and ARM follow similar security underpinnings and outcomes. ARM has TrustZone, x86 has TEEs. I cannot think of a single attack demonstrated on x86 and not on ARM or vice versa. Could you please cite one?
- astrange 2y agoWho cares about TrustZone? x86 doesn't have PAC or MTE.
- ngneer 2y agoARM/IoT community: https://community.arm.com/support-forums/f/architectures-and-processors-forum/7983/a-couple-of-use-cases-for-trustzone-for-armv8-m https://community.arm.com/support-forums/f/architectures-and... https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/internet-of-things-blog/posts/security-scenarios-addressed-by-arm-cortex-m23-and-cortex-m33 https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/internet-of-... Security practitioners and academics: https://github.com/enovella/TEE-reversing/ https://github.com/enovella/TEE-reversing/ https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10859-trustzone-m_eh_breaking_armv8-m_s_security https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10859-trustzone-m_eh_breaking_ar... https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Shen-Attacking-Your-Trusted-Core-Exploiting-Trustzone-On-Android-wp.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Shen-Att... https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Thursday/us-19-Peterlin-Breaking-Samsungs-ARM-TrustZone.pdf https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Thursday/us-19-Peterlin-Breaki... Sorry you could not cite an attack demonstrated on x86 and not on ARM or vice versa. Well, maybe TikTag (https://github.com/compsec-snu/tiktag https://github.com/compsec-snu/tiktag) was demonstrated against ARM MTE, since you mention, and Pacman (https://pacmanattack.com/ https://pacmanattack.com/) against PAC. I was hoping for an actual response, no offense.
- vbezhenar 2y agoIs it impossible to use macOS as a virtualization host?
- exabrial 2y agoI think it's interesting everyone that dissented mentioned power consumption. Our business "only" sees about 1,000-25,000 req/min, our message brokers transmit MAX 25k msg/s. Easily handled by a rack of 10 servers for redundancy. We are not Google and we don't pretend to be, so we don't care about power, as the difference is a few dollars a month.