[markphip]

I wonder if the system on a chip design of Apple Silicon would work for servers. Would it just be a special packaging that crammed several Mac mini boards into a rack mounted chassis? If so, then they would just be repeating what others are already doing.

The RAM being part of the chip seems like a limiter to scaling up to a server model with a lot of cores and RAM in a single blade.

Not saying this is not all doable just that it probably requires design and investment they otherwise do not have any desire to do.

[devrand]

Even if they just replicate what these companies are doing I think there's two main benefits:

  1. less waste. The entire case is being thrown away immediately by these volume consumers. All the packaging and what not is also wasted.
  2. easier/cheaper deployment. Companies are already paying their employees to design replacement cases, control boards, etc. and getting them built at relatively small scales. Then they're paying them to shuck and transplant from the Mac Minis. Apple could probably charge a >50% premium for their solution vs the equivalent number of Mac Minis and companies would jump on it.

Additionally, at least in my experience, the headaches and fixed costs of deploying these machines means companies refresh them far less often than other hardware. It's totally possible that companies would refresh more frequently if Apple just sold something easier to deploy.