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So does this cut out Intel/x86 from all the massive new datacenter buildouts entirely? They've already lost Apple as a customer and are not competitive in the c

So does this cut out Intel/x86 from all the massive new datacenter buildouts entirely? They've already lost Apple as a customer and are not competitive in the consumer space. I don't see how they can realistically grow at all with x86.

alecco 8mo ago
Even Apple hardware looks inexpensive compared to Nvidia's huge premium. And never mind the order backlog. x86 and Apple already sell CPUs with integrated memory and high bandwidth interconnects. And I bet eventually Intel's beancounter board will wake up and allow engineering to make one, too. But competition is good for the market.
- storus 8mo ago
  Apple went from a high-end PC to a low-end AI provider due to blocking Nvidia on their platform.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    Worse, because since they no longer care about workstation market, there are pluggable cards, and no update to the chese grater, which the Studio is not comparable to. They also dropped the ball on the data center, having left OS X Server behind. Those markets are now served by Windows or Linux based configurations.
- bigyabai 8mo ago
  Even with those advantages, Apple can't even sell datacenter hardware to themselves: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-reportedly-sitting-unused-on-warehouse-shelves-due-to-low-apple-intelligence-usage/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...
  - MoonWalk 8mo ago
    "And as the initial crop of Apple Intelligence features hasn’t been used as much as Apple expected" Nah, as so-called "analysts" expected. The no-effort crybabies deriding Apple for being "behind on AI" have turned out to be, shocker of shockers, wrong. Anyone who even put a few minutes of thought into Apple's business realized that it (and its customers) didn't stand to benefit much from "AI." It's sad that Apple hurried to pander to these clowns, only to be derided further... and to encounter the appropriate apathy from customers, who were and are doing just fine without asinine "AI" gimmicks.
    - bigyabai 8mo ago
      Apple wouldn't have built the server capacity if they thought it wouldn't be used. It's indeed their own analysis. In any case, that article is also looking forward to next-gen models like the sparse Gemini model Google trained for Siri. Apple Silicon simply isn't powerful enough to compete for that inference.
mikrl 8mo ago
>are not competitive in the consumer space AFAIK they still dominate on clock rate, which I was surprised to see when doing some back of the envelope calculations regarding core counts. I felt my 8 core i9 9900K was inadequate, so shopped around for something AMD, and IIRC the core multiplier of the chip I found was dominated by the clock rate multiplier so it’s possible that at full utilization my i9 is still towards the best I can get at the price. Not sure if I’m the typical consumer in this case however.
- kllrnohj 8mo ago
  Your 9900k at 5ghz does work slower than a Ryzen 9800X3D at 5ghz. A lot slower (1700 single core geekbench vs 3300, and just about any benchmark will tell the same story). Clock speed alone doesn't mean anything.
  - mikrl 8mo ago
    From the newegg listing: >8 Cores and 16 processing threads, based on AMD "Zen 5" architecture which is the same thread geometry as my 9900K. My main concerns at the time were: 1. More cores for running large workloads on k8s since I had just upgraded to 128G RAM 2. More thread level parallelism for my C++ code Naively I thought that, ceteris paribus and assuming good L1 cache utilization, having more physical cores with a higher clock rate would be the ticket for 2. Does the 9800X3D have a wider pipeline or is it some other microarchitectural feature that makes it faster?
    - joefourier 8mo ago
      You don't even need to go into the pipeline details. The 9800X3D has 8x more L2 cache, 6x more L3 cache, 2x the memory bandwidth than the now 8 years old i9 9900K. 3D V-cache is pretty cool.
    - kllrnohj 8mo ago
      I purposely picked a CPU with the same thread geometry as your 9900K to avoid calls of "apples & oranges" or whatever. If you want more threads, the 9950X is right there in the same socket. Or Core Ultra 9 285k. Either of which will run circles around a 9900K in code compilation. You can research microarchitecture differences if you want, it's a fascinating world, or you can just skip to looking at benchmarks/reviews. Little hard to compare against quite that large of a generation gap, but eg https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/rip-intel-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-cpu-review-benchmarks-vs-7800x3d-285k-14900k-more#9800x3d-production-benchmarks https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/rip-intel-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-c... or https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-linux/2 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-linux/2

alecco 8mo ago

Even Apple hardware looks inexpensive compared to Nvidia's huge premium. And never mind the order backlog. x86 and Apple already sell CPUs with integrated memory and high bandwidth interconnects. And I bet eventually Intel's beancounter board will wake up and allow engineering to make one, too. But competition is good for the market.

storus 8mo ago
Apple went from a high-end PC to a low-end AI provider due to blocking Nvidia on their platform.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Worse, because since they no longer care about workstation market, there are pluggable cards, and no update to the chese grater, which the Studio is not comparable to. They also dropped the ball on the data center, having left OS X Server behind. Those markets are now served by Windows or Linux based configurations.
bigyabai 8mo ago
Even with those advantages, Apple can't even sell datacenter hardware to themselves: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-reportedly-sitting-unused-on-warehouse-shelves-due-to-low-apple-intelligence-usage/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...
- MoonWalk 8mo ago
  "And as the initial crop of Apple Intelligence features hasn’t been used as much as Apple expected" Nah, as so-called "analysts" expected. The no-effort crybabies deriding Apple for being "behind on AI" have turned out to be, shocker of shockers, wrong. Anyone who even put a few minutes of thought into Apple's business realized that it (and its customers) didn't stand to benefit much from "AI." It's sad that Apple hurried to pander to these clowns, only to be derided further... and to encounter the appropriate apathy from customers, who were and are doing just fine without asinine "AI" gimmicks.
  - bigyabai 8mo ago
    Apple wouldn't have built the server capacity if they thought it wouldn't be used. It's indeed their own analysis. In any case, that article is also looking forward to next-gen models like the sparse Gemini model Google trained for Siri. Apple Silicon simply isn't powerful enough to compete for that inference.

mikrl 8mo ago

>are not competitive in the consumer space AFAIK they still dominate on clock rate, which I was surprised to see when doing some back of the envelope calculations regarding core counts. I felt my 8 core i9 9900K was inadequate, so shopped around for something AMD, and IIRC the core multiplier of the chip I found was dominated by the clock rate multiplier so it’s possible that at full utilization my i9 is still towards the best I can get at the price. Not sure if I’m the typical consumer in this case however.

kllrnohj 8mo ago
Your 9900k at 5ghz does work slower than a Ryzen 9800X3D at 5ghz. A lot slower (1700 single core geekbench vs 3300, and just about any benchmark will tell the same story). Clock speed alone doesn't mean anything.
- mikrl 8mo ago
  From the newegg listing: >8 Cores and 16 processing threads, based on AMD "Zen 5" architecture which is the same thread geometry as my 9900K. My main concerns at the time were: 1. More cores for running large workloads on k8s since I had just upgraded to 128G RAM 2. More thread level parallelism for my C++ code Naively I thought that, ceteris paribus and assuming good L1 cache utilization, having more physical cores with a higher clock rate would be the ticket for 2. Does the 9800X3D have a wider pipeline or is it some other microarchitectural feature that makes it faster?
  - joefourier 8mo ago
    You don't even need to go into the pipeline details. The 9800X3D has 8x more L2 cache, 6x more L3 cache, 2x the memory bandwidth than the now 8 years old i9 9900K. 3D V-cache is pretty cool.
  - kllrnohj 8mo ago
    I purposely picked a CPU with the same thread geometry as your 9900K to avoid calls of "apples & oranges" or whatever. If you want more threads, the 9950X is right there in the same socket. Or Core Ultra 9 285k. Either of which will run circles around a 9900K in code compilation. You can research microarchitecture differences if you want, it's a fascinating world, or you can just skip to looking at benchmarks/reviews. Little hard to compare against quite that large of a generation gap, but eg https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/rip-intel-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-cpu-review-benchmarks-vs-7800x3d-285k-14900k-more#9800x3d-production-benchmarks https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/rip-intel-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-c... or https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-linux/2 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-linux/2