News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by _ph_ on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @02:25PM (#25061877)
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.
Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by Wowfunhappy on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @02:31PM (#25061953)
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?

Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by _ph_ on Thursday November 12, 2020 @08:44AM (#25069749)
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.
Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by iSnow on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:33AM (#25070913)
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"

Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable... by _ph_ on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:52AM (#25071117)
Yes, that was the context of the statement. But it also would give an answer how customers would use an AS Xserve.