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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I'm considering Intel for my next workstation because I want to be able to run macOS at least in VirtualBox (or just run Hackintosh, did not decide yet). For some reason macOS does not like AMD CPUs.

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There was a recent video on Linus Tech Tips where they set up a Threadripper workstation running macOS via KVM and it out-performed a top of the line iMac Pro.

Does it work with VirtualBox? I want to run Windows.

You can run Windows in KVM. I haven't used VirtualBox for years so my knowledge is out of date.

> For some reason macOS does not like AMD CPUs.

Reddit:"Mojave, now on Ryzen!" https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/a95xlo/mojave_n...

Installing custom built kernel on a proprietary OS sounds like a recipe for disaster. It's likely to break on the first update. More like a proof of concept rather than stable solution.

With a little elbow grease this hasn't been true for Hackintosh builds nor virtualization for ages: https://amd-osx.com

You can run MacOS through KVM easy on Ryzen. Even GPU passthrough works fine.

iMessage and other features generally break when running amd macintoshes, intel ones are indistinguishable.

Why would they break if macOS itself runs fine on AMD? These softwares run on macOS and don't make any system calls directly by bypassing the OS, right?

They typically check for a network interface from a real Mac. Using a Hackintosh you can't spoof some of the NIC details that are detected and cause iCloud/iMessage to not work.

Oh, wasn't aware of that. So does iCloud / iMessage work when macOS is run virtualised?

Oh man, my suggestion buy a used dual socket Xeon V2 (or V3 if you can afford it) server with room for a GPU. The price for performance is pretty unbelievable since you get a whole system, which you can run ESXi or whatever flavor of hypervisor you want.

V2/V3 Xeons are dirt cheap on ebay and if you don't mind a little risk the ES versions are mighty cheap for what you can get.

I just got Dual 2667 V2, 96GB of ram, dual 1200W PSUs, and room for 20 SAS2 HDs for less than $1,000 (replaced the 2637 V2s that came with the system). I'll note power consumption will be quite a bit higher, but power is pretty cheap where I live.

.... I'll be really stoked in a few years when the Rome chips are available used.

I have a Dell Precision T7600. The only thing I hate is the almost full minute to boot with a perc controller and other servery type checks

It won't work in a virtual machine? Any reason why?

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