Apple M1 Mac as a Service

Boots in 5 minutes, minimum allocation of 24 hours, is "low stock" if you actually try to allocate one, and was recently "no stock". I'd be unsure if its actually available when you need it. They offered bare metal ARM some years ago and discontinued them (but I guess M1 hardware is a bit more reliable and/or popular enough [1]).

Would be nice to see a Virtualization.Framework as a service, such as with Tart / Orchard [1], but perhaps there are performance and security issues when making those M1s multi-tenant. The license limits it to a maximum of two guest systems anyway, and only for the purposes of software development and testing [2].

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/21/scaleway_arm64_cloud_...

[2] https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart/

[3] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSVentura.pdf#page=2 (2B iii)

I'm curious about what makes that offer so special that it made it to the front page. It seems that AWS has had a similar offer for over a year now ( https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/07/general-a... ). Additionally, there are public offerings of Apple M2-as-a-service available already ( https://www.macstadium.com/m2-studio-pro-orders , https://www.macminivault.com/ ).

Apple M1 mac GPU is orders of magnitude slower than a single Nvidia T4 GPU with CUDA for certain machine learning tasks.

This was my experience while trying to run Stable diffusion Inpainting/Outpainting to expand images. This task took a mere 5-10 seconds on Nvidia T4, while it took almost 5-6 mins on M1 mac. Nvidia T4 was almost 30x or more faster. I’m not sure how much of this performance is attributable only to the GPU and how much to CUDA working only on Nvidia T4.

They've had this since 2021: https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-introduces-apple-s...

Nice website, but trying to rent out compute regardless of platform is no game, good luck.

also, wtf is this about?

> Due to license constraints, the minimum lease for Apple silicon-as-a-Service is 24 hours. As a result, a Mac mini M1 can only be deleted after a minimum allocation period of 24 hours.