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Comment by bonestamp2 | Hacker News Reader

When these chips hit the rackmount Mac Pro, the server competition will be very interesting. It's kind of a unique package for a server, which such a powerful GPU, but that has advantages for some compute types too of course.

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The rackmount Mac Pro isn't really a server, it's just a Mac Pro in a rack mountable enclosure. It's 4U and kind of poorly laid out for a server. It helps if you need 10 or 20 or a 100 Mac Pros specifically and have to position them in an efficient manner but a proper server would be no more than 2U with a very compact layout and little wasted space inside so you can pack a rack as densely as possible.

Would be cool if they try to decouple the GPU and CPU for server units somehow.

I think they will with a new release of the “Afterburner” card, this time powered by Apple Silicon instead of FPGAs.

https://www.gettingtechnologyright.com/apples-mac-pro-wheels...

>The second bit of design is in the optional “Afterburner” video editing card. The discussion of it starts at around the 1hr. 26 min. point in the Keynote. It is described as a custom FPGA-based HW accelerator. It is claimed to be capable of processing 6 billion pixels per second. The silicon is not Apple’s but the design is.

Isn't the point of a FPGA that you can reconfigure it? It seems like a waste to expend it on another CPU.

I’ve certainly seen in low volume specialty equipment (think things like Video Routers, and surprisingly some high end audio equipment) FPGAs being used where an ASIC would be a better fit. I suspect however this comes down to a business decision, that the time and money spent getting a run of an ASIC with the same logic put together may be better spent elsewhere.

The FPGA can be deployed and designed for today, while an ASIC isn't going to ready until after a few tape outs, and it's often a race to market. While it's really cool and actually works, the reality is that reconfiguring the hardware to do something different isn't a necessary feature in just about anything. There's still a huge market for FPGAs, but its already got a lot of active competition.

From what we’ve seen, the M1 design is quite modular. I don’t see a reason why they could not use 4 or 6 high-performance CPU clusters and a low-core GPU for a server part of they wanted. No GPU at all might be impractical because a lot of things in the OS might have come to expect one.

Anyway, it’s academical because I don’t see them doing that. Expect maybe to power their own datacenters, but then we’d never hear about it.

Well, considering how well the M1 variants are performing in the performance/watt category and this is one major cost factor for data centers, I would assume Apple by all means is going to use their own chips in the future. And then there is no good reason not to sell a tons of them to anyone who is willing to pay Apple prices for server hardware. (Which aren't that bad, compared to other server hardware prices)

But this might a bit in the future as they barely can make enough of them for the MacBooks. I even would assume that the launch of the other computers in the lineup has been put to a later time to be able to keep up at least a bit with demand.

Wait max 2 years when the AWS contracts expire

Apple has many different types of data centers.

Some are actually hosted in a cloud provider like Google, Microsoft, or AWS.

But they also have a fair amount of their own physical data centers, and I would not be surprised to find that they start filling them out with Apple Silicon hardware.

And they might roll out a lot of services on AWS using Apple Silicon hardware, because AWS has recently made available actual Apple hardware in some of their regions. I think this could potentially be a precursor, but this is just my own personal hunch and I have no information outside my own brain towards this end.

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