OpenPOWER is awesome though. I'm hoping Talos will get enough interest; I'm ready to throw money at them if it succeeds. POWER chips are super good, I don't know how IBM has managed to keep up with Intel's R&D but they're definitely competitive in performance.
The A9 has PCI Express lanes for NVMe flash that could be used to add wired networking and storage while the secure boot and code signing would allow them to build a microserver that only runs their code. This arrangement would also be incredibly cost effective for them.
They would want to give their SoCs have properly protected internal data paths and the necessary logic for ECC RAM before using them in micro-servers if those chip features are not already there though. If they are, I doubt that the ECC is being used in their iDevices.
They have the luxury of having enough cash, and enough profitability, to do things that have negative ROI. The recently concluded lawsuit comes to mind — there was no business case for not settling it at the earliest. They didn't settle at all, and took it to the US Supreme Court.
And if a secure architecture requires a custom-designed backend server farm, they can do it, and even probably make it revenue-neutral, by re-introducing the Xserve product line.
I don't think they will do a full-blown custom design, and the advantage of having their own hardware stack is that they can leverage existing technology, and make a few tweaks. And they must have been running at least designs on this possibility, because they do want to take notebook/desktop processor manufacture in-house in the medium term, and end reliance on Intel.
I'm inclined to disagree. Apple is a global company, and many of its customers would not look favorably upon the US government being able to force Apple to decrypt their data. I actually think that Apple would have gone as far as to move a good portion of their operations outside the US and create separate legal entities to protect against this had they lost the case.
And while globally people tend to have mixed opinions of Americans, the US government and its three-letter agencies are almost universally despised around the world. Apple being seen as a willing cooperator with the US government (especially on the issue of privacy / espionage) would be a huge blow to their global brand.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-07/apple-...
http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/06/06/datacenter-equipment-app...
Don't know how robust it is compared to e.g. VMWare or VirtualBox, but it seems to be working well enough in my simple tests.
I was really excited about that project but it doesn't appear to be getting much attention.