Hacker News Reader

Comment by leohonexus | Hacker News Reader

I understand the need for it to be in Siemens NX, but do they really run it in Windows VMs? As far as I know NX isn't certified to run in VMs without Nvidia GPU passthrough (aka Macs). It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.

View on HN

> It seems more sensible to maintain a fleet of Windows desktops specifically for CAD and industrial control.

I don't see why. Build a VM image in the more sensible OS and work from there

Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird

They probably can solve every video driver issue they find or just find a way to use an nVidia card on a beefy Intel Mac

(or do the same on Linux - also possible)

> Don't worry about IT support, just burn the VM and replace whenever something gets weird

You don't need VMs for that. You can reset to a known good state on your bare metal disk drive just as well.

Yeah, a couple years ago (sorry, no citation handy) I wasn't too surprised to learn that a Windows desktop can run faster in a VM on Intel Mac hardware than directly on a similarly-priced PC.

That was my experience during the Intel Mac era, when I did a lot of Windows development inside of a Mac VM.

IMO, the reason is all of the 3rd party fluff and poorly-written drivers that come with Windows PCs: Apple takes driver stability very seriously, and the drivers on a Windows VM are as vanilla (no fluff or features) as possible.

It could be VDIs, i.e. VMs running on another system, potentially x86 with GPU

More sensible, yes... but less ideologically pure.

Considering their backend (iCloud, etc.) runs on Linux fleets, I believe they are more pragmatic than idealists.

I'd love to see a full fleet of Mac servers (XServe was a handsome piece of kit), but I believe one shall choose their battles.

Im curious which OS they run on these https://wccftech.com/apples-private-cloud-compute-server-m5-...

isn't it very stripped down iOS?

So this is all pure speculation, but seeing as they are a hardware company I wonder if they have some sort of internal only server chassis to house apple motherboards for their backend, tolerate asahi linux for this? No real external market for apple servers so they don't develop it past "Ok for internal use"

The more I think about it the more I doubt it, even if you make your own hardware it is hard to compete with a commodity server, but it is an interesting thought.

Update: or perhaps they do, a sibling comment had a picture of such.

They definitely have their own servers. There was a post about that, some time ago. There’s a sibling post to yours, about them.

Not sure about the backplane architecture. I’m pretty sure they are custom datacenter rack units.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com