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What if Apple releases M1 server?

5 points by ramazanpolat ↗ HN
M1 is definitely faster then most x86 CPUs and consumes way lower power. So, what if apple releases M1 like platform for servers? Think like an M2 chip with 32 cores and 256GM memory. It will cut the electric bill of those server farms in half! Maybe even the x86 ERA will come to an end. Please tell me I may be right guys!

5 comments

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speedgoose
You will have to give 30% of your gross annual revenue to deploy on Apple servers.
haspoken
Servers haven't been a thing for Apple for some time, nor does Apple have the sort of service that server owners would tolerate.

Besides, another post today puts to question that M1 is faster:

Apple M1 twice as slow than old mobile gen on Cinebench multicore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25122825

dzhiurgis
They definitely need some sort of iCloud PaaS/SaaS tho.

AWS already has ARM machines, presumably made by same TSMC so would be getting same results as these Macs.

Communitivity
Elsewhere on HN today is a story about a teen who sold his kidney to get an iPhone, and is now bedridden for life because of it.

A monoculture in nature, or in technology, is almost never good. I remember PowerPC days, when I had bought a whole bunch of software for professional use (incl. Adobe Creative Suite). Then they switched from PowerPC. Now all of a sudden most of my software either wouldn't run, or ran very slow. M1 will be the same thing if it is only built by Apple. I expect Mac prices to soar for the next revision, in an attempt by Apple to recoup the cost of M1 development.

x86 isn't a monoculture, though it's not far off, because there are three manufacturers of x86 chips (Intel, Via, and AMD).

If Apple had continued with the trend of excellence that existed while Steve Jobs was alive (no comments about the man personally, but he was extremely demanding about product quality), then I might be more inclined to see this as a good thing. But with what I perceive as falling quality in product and falling quality in design decisions, I can't see the M1 transition being handled well.

I also see it as a scary precursor to a possible new trend: each of the big corps making hardware and software (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) comes out with their own proprietary chips, with the vendor lock in that implies when people buy their new software.

lproven
You know that Apple used to do servers, right?

It did dedicated servers way back in the Classic era:

• http://www.erik.co.uk/ans/

• https://lowendmac.com/tag/apple-workgroup-server/

• https://everymac.com/systems/apple/network_server/index-netw...

Then it introduced sleek new 1U ones in the PowerPC G4 era:

• https://lowendmac.com/2002/xserve-g4-mid-2002/

• https://lowendmac.com/2003/xserve-g4-early-2003/

These got replaced by G5 models:

• https://lowendmac.com/2004/xserve-g5-early-2004/

• https://lowendmac.com/2005/xserve-g5-early-2005/

Then Intel Xeon models:

• https://lowendmac.com/2006/xserve-xeon-late-2006/

• https://lowendmac.com/2008/xserve-xeon-early-2008/

• https://lowendmac.com/2009/xserve-nehalem-mid-2009/

It also did a very impressive dedicated RAID box for the XServe:

• https://everymac.com/systems/apple/xserve/specs/xserve_raid....

So it is very much not new to the server market.

The problem is that although Mac OS X Server was an excellent product in a lot of ways, and offered unlimited user licenses before it was discounted, it still didn't sell well.

It's a bunch of good, professional GUI admin tools on top of a lot of FOSS Unix server tools. The same tools run on Linux on COTS kit, and cost nothing, if you know how to run them.

So, yes, Apple could. But there are already ARM servers out there. You can buy them straight off the shelf:

https://www.gigabyte.com/ARM-Server

https://www.bamboosystems.io/

This being so, it's hard to see how Apple could compete, when its OS X server efforts all ultimately failed and were discontinued, leaving only the software:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/os-x-server/id883878097