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Comment by sys_64738 | Hacker News Reader

It’s down to brute force raw power and performance per watt nowadays. Apple mostly wins the latter but the former is inevitably going to kill demand for those climate unfriendly servers due to cooling and powering problems. We await the high end Mac systems with much interest.

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Since those high-end Mac systems won't be able to run in datacenters, what's the point there? You're pretty much at the mercy of whatever Intel, AMD and other ARM manufacturers release.

> Mac systems won’t be able to run in datacenters

https://aws.amazon.com/pm/ec2-mac/

These are seemingly MacOS only which doesn’t really qualify for the vast majority of data center uses. They’re here to build software for Apple devices and that’s pretty much it.

From that link, the use cases are:

> Developing, building, testing, and signing iOS, iPadOS, macOS, WatchOS, and tvOS applications on the Xcode IDE.

I thought it was more for when you don't have a choice (Apple forces you to) than general usage. Are things going to change?

IIRC the MacOS EULA forbids anything else

but ..

When Linux boots natively on these systems that restriction will fall away.

Well not sure about your data center comment. But it has gotten those making purchasing decisions asking about ARM based and their alternatives. Apple doing ARM lends legitimacy to other ARM vendors where previously the topic could lead to ridicule.

Apple should license the M1 core architecture to someone to make server chips with it. They'd make some extra money and lose nothing... in fact they might gain since it would build market share around the architecture.

So obvious, and yet apple is worth $3tr...

If the massive bandwidth shared CPU / GPU memory approach is optimum on the desktop for many workloads then one would think that there would be a sizeable market for that in the cloud - after all many desktop workloads (video editing) for example are moving to the cloud.

Can’t see it being Apple but feels like an opportunity for someone.

Because Apple wasn't interested in doing that some engineers left to found their own company doing Apple style cores for serves. It was called Nuvia. It was eventually bought by Qualcomm who decided to try to use those cores in Mobile despite the actual designs not being suited for that. I feel like I shouldn't just spill Charlie's scoop on exactly why[1] but it doesn't look good.

[1]https://semiaccurate.com/2021/12/01/how-is-the-qualcomm-nuvi...

My suggestion it to watch the investor day meeting along with Ananadtech reporting on the issue. As usual not sure what Charlies is on about.

>who decided to try to use those cores in Mobile despite the actual designs not being suited for that. I

Not sure where that idea came from. It was designed with similar wattage in mind as current A15.

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