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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

At what point Apple will put those chips in their servers or sell server chips? It only makes sense for them to take this architecture to the cloud deployments

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As more developers move to ARM architecture by buying Macbooks (I did it last year the first time in my life), ARM cloud will grow very fast, and Apple needs growth, so they can't afford not to do it in a few years (probably with M2 architecture they are already thinking of it). Regarding the exact timeline: I don't know :)

They’d have to go all-in on supporting third party OSs like Linux first. Sure, there are projects to bring linux to the M1, but enterprises that buy commercial server hardware will demand 1st party support

Knowing Apple, their version of "cloud" servers would probably be some sort of SDK that lets developers build applications on top of their hardware / software stack, and charge per usage. Kind of like Firebase, but with Apple's stack.

It will be a hard business decision for them, as at this point it's extremely hard to compete with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Maybe they will buy up some cloud services provider, we'll see.

The major Linux providers already offer 1st party supported Linux on AWS. Both RHEL and Ubuntu instances offer support contracts from their respective companies, as well as Amazon Linux from AWS themselves. It is already here and a big force there. You can provision ElastiCache and RDS Graviton instances too.

Yes but on architectures that are already supported outside of AWS. It's not about running Linux in AWS, it's about running Linux on the chosen chip.

They likely won't re-visit the Xserve, IMO. No reason to. They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers and its outside their area of expertise.

> They can't sell them at a premium compared to peers

Intel is believed to have pretty good margins on their server CPUs

> and its outside their area of expertise.

That's what people used to say about Apple doing CPUs in-house.

FWIW, Apple's been helping define CPU specs in-house since the 90s. They were part of an alliance with Motorola and IBM to make PowerPC, and bought a substantial part of ARM and did a joint venture to make Newton's CPU. And they've done a bunch of architecture jumps, from 6502 to 68k to PPC to Intel to A-series.

Folks who said CPUs weren't their core expertise (I assume back in 2010 or before, prior to A4) missed out on just how involved they've historically been, what it takes to get involved, the role of fabs and off the shelf IP to gradually build expertise, and what benefits were possible when building silicon and software toward common purpose.

I don't know, the performance per watt has a big effect on data-centers, both in power budget and HVAC for cooling.

I doubt they'll go after the web server market. But I wonder if they might go after the sort of rendering farms that animation studios like Pixar use. Those guys are willing to pay silly money for hardware, and are market Apple has a long history with.

To be fair, that exact criticism has been leveled against them multiple times before and been proven wrong.

It doesn't make much sense to me. The M1 is designed to have memory in the same package as the processor. This leads to reduced latency and increased bandwidth. Moving to off-package memory might totally destroy its performance, and there is an upper limit on how much memory can go in the package.

The M1 Ultra is already a little light on memory for its price and processing power; it would have much too little memory for a cloud host.

They could be secretly working on their own cloud platform, with their data centres having a choice between M1, Pro Max ultra instances. $$$$

Don’t they already offer Xcode build as a service? That presumably is using Mac servers so it wouldn’t be totally out of the blue to have more Mac SaaS.

For a company betting so heavily on “services,” it would be borderline incompetence if they weren’t working on this. Even just for internal use it would still be a better investment than the stupid car.

It's going to be a couple years. The guys who bought those power workstations and servers will be very peeved if it happens too quickly

It makes sense, although what I am concerned about is the cost. Apple isn't exactly know for providing services at or near cost.

I bet someone will make a bracket to hold a bunch of Mac Studios in a rack.

Unfortunately I still don't think the market has much interest in energy-efficient servers. But maybe the energy-sector crunch created by Putin's war will precipitate some change here...

Energy is probably the biggest bill for a data centre.

Lower TDP = lower electric bills and lower airconditioning bill. Win win

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