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chis | 2 months ago

I wonder what motivates apple to release features like RDMA which are purely useful for server clusters, while ignoring basic qol stuff like remote management or rack mount hardware. It’s difficult to see it as a cohesive strategy.

Makes one wonder what apple uses for their own servers. I guess maybe they have some internal M-series server product they just haven’t bothered to release to the public, and features like this are downstream of that?

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hamdingers|2 months ago

> I guess maybe they have some internal M-series server product they just haven’t bothered to release to the public, and features like this are downstream of that?

Or do they have some real server-grade product coming down the line, and are releasing this ahead of it so that 3rd party software supports it on launch day?

spacedcowboy|2 months ago

I worked on some of the internal server hardware. Yes they do have their own boards. Apple used to be all-in on Linux, but the newer chips are far and away more power-efficient, and power is one of the (if not the) major cost of outfitting a datacenter, at least over time.

These machines are very much internal - you can cram a lot of M-series (to use the public nomenclature) chips onto a rack-sized PCB. I was never under the impression they were destined for anything other than Apple datacenters though...

As I mentioned above, it seems to me there's a couple of feature that appeared on the customer-facing designs that were inspired by what the datacenter people wanted on their own PCB boards.

MBCook|2 months ago

That they sell to the public? No way. They’ve clearly given up on server stuff and it makes sense for them.

That they use INTERNALLY for their servers? I could certainly see this being useful for that.

Mostly I think this is just to get money from the AI boom. They already had TB5, it’s not like this was costing them additional hardware. Just some time that probably paid off on their internal model training anyway.

erik|2 months ago

The Mac Studio, in some ways, is in a class of its own for LLM inference. I think this is Apple leaning into that. They didn't add RDMA for general server clustering usefulness. They added it so you can put 4 Studios together in an LLM inferencing cluster exactly as demonstrated in the article.

vsgherzi|2 months ago

last I heard for the private compute features they were racking and stacking m2 mac pros

jeffbee|2 months ago

I honestly forgot they still made the Mac Pro. Amazing that they have these ready to ship on their website. But at a 50% premium over similar but faster Mac Studio models, what is the point? You can't usefully put GPUs in them as far as I know. You'd have to have a different PCIe need to make it make sense.

xienze|2 months ago

> rack mount hardware

I guess they prefer that third parties deal with that. There’s rack mount shelves for Mac Minis and Studios.

mschuster91|2 months ago

There's still a lot - particularly remote management, aka iLO in HP lingo - missing for an actual hands-off environment usable for hosters.

Melatonic|2 months ago

Do they run any of their own datacenter stuff ? I thought they just outsourced to GCP

raw_anon_1111|2 months ago

They outsource to GCP and AWS. An Apple executive has been on stage at ReInvent for the past couple of years

re-thc|2 months ago

They have some of their own, also use AWS and others too.

oofbey|2 months ago

Blog posts like this one are great marketing.

rsync|2 months ago

These are my own questions - asked since the first mac mini was introduced:

- Why is the tooling so lame ?

- What do they, themselves, use internally ?

Stringing together mac minis (or a "Studio", whatever) with thunderbolt cables ... Christ.

sneak|2 months ago

I assume a company like Apple either has custom server boards with tons of unified memory on M series with all the i/o they could want (that are ugly and thus not productized) or just use standard expensive nvidia stuff like everyone else.

jeffbee|2 months ago

thunderbolt rdma is quite clearly the nuclear option for remote management.