This is stupefying to me. Like, when Anand did the A12 or A11 reviews, I wrote:

"The craziest thing is how close [to 1/56th of a Xeon 8176] they get at 3W. That's the part that's staggering. What could Apple do with, say, laptop thermals? Desktop thermals? The mind creeps closer to boggling." -- me, 5 October 2018

Guess we're finding out.

Would this be good a chip for a data warehouse?

I think so, especially with the specialized hardware in there for machine learning (although in a data center you'd probably opt for specialized hardware like discrete GPUs). There are some players on the market for ARM servers as well.

That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market. They might use variations of it in their own data centers, maybe.

> That said, Apple won't make their chips available to the greater market.

I wonder if this could potentially be a good time to bring back Xserve...

They definitely should. Even if the profit on the device wouldn't be decisive, but chip making is all about production numbers. Using the Apple Silicon first for all the Apple owned cloud servers and then offering them in Xserve units would be very profitable and could reduce the power draw of data warehouses a lot.

The question marks for me would be:

1) Is Apple interested (and capable) making macOS into a realistic choice for servers again?

2) If not, is Apple comfortable with selling a box that most people will put Linux on? Would they put resources into a Bootcamp-esque driver package?

The biggest question is: does Apple want to bring back the Xserver? If yes, there are several ways. If not, no good proposal will sway them :) But one thing was interesting during the AS announcement at WWDC. Federighi stressed how good a hypervisor macOS is. That was probably first of all a comment about virtualization on the new Macs, but could also allow to install any operation system as guest on a cloud server. Many cloud services are running inside VMs.

The only reason for that statement is to silence those who would raise a stink over the loss of Bootcamp.

"See, you don't need native Linux on the machine, just use our hypervisor & Docker/VMs"

Yes, that was the context of the statement. But it also would give an answer how customers would use an AS Xserve.

The market for Mac OS specific services would be vanishingly small; everybody else can just use Linux. Apple's not going to make a play for a commodity market.

this is what that boggles my mind. Like are those benchmarks really comparable? I mean Intel and AMD have been doing this far longer than Apple and it seemed as if Apple just came in and bend the laws of physics that Intel and AMD have been limited by

Apple has been at it for 12 years (they bought PA Semi in 2008). The talent they brought onboard with PA Semi had been producing processors since 2003.

Experience counts, but Apple is pretty old-hat at this by now as well.

Apple has been designing chips since the A4 in 2010. Samsung, TMSC, and other manufacturers with more experience actually build the chips for Apple, and this M1 is no exception being manufactured by TMSC.

Isn’t that just the ARM vs x86 difference? They’re completely different architectures, each with their own benefits and drawbacks.

With the size of modern chips the instruction set has very little to do with an overall chip design. Most of it is a balancing act between power, performance and area for things like caches, controllers, optimizations, accelerators and so on. Then there are also factors like verification complexity and the fab technology you are choosing.

I would have thought so too, but why are there no ARM based competitors coming out with similar numbers? Or are there?

Graviton2 I expect would stack up nicely.

One factor seems to be the vertical integration. It seems like these days there are a bunch of large companies succeeding by having the users of the hardware involved tightly with the the designers of that hardware. Tesla is definitely doing it. I think Google is doing it with machine learning. And Apple has definitely been doing it with their phones and tablets. The feedback loop is tight, valuable, and beneficial. No need to make big compromises for backward compatibility, either, just update the software.