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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

There's still a lot to be said for software support, IO, RAM, etc.

Yeah, the Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of DRAM (vs. 16GB), it's got a bunch of slots and discrete GPUs, and it can run Windows and Windows VMs. I hope it doesn't end up as an orphan system like the 2013 "trash can" Mac Pro, which was an interesting system that got zero upgrades. Perhaps Apple will offer Apple Silicon upgrades to Mac Pro buyers.

Assuming they can build it (and they have implied that they can scale their silicon designs up in terms of cores, power, and clock rate), an Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be a pretty interesting machine.

If they wanted to, Apple could even bring back an Apple Silicon powered Xserve, or the legendary, mythical, modular desktop Mac (I know, now we're in the realm of pure fantasy, but one can dream.)

> Apple could even bring back an Apple Silicon powered Xserve

Given their performance/watt, this sounds like it could be potentially game changing.

I don’t know if the wider audiences would invest heavily enough in servers given Apple’s graveyard of products in that space.

Amazon AWS is already doing this with their own ARM cpus.

Yes, but Apple's ARM implementations seem to be better than ARM's.

The Gravitons are based on Cortex-A76 aren't they? Don't phones with that architecture benchmark similar to an Apple A10?

It's clear to me that they will.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft each have a cloud offering.

The M1 is just what Apple needed to compete there.

Also GPU: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/1799092?bas...

The Vega II is even faster (but quite a bit more expensive).

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