Apple hasn't seemed interested historically. And the Nuvia folks left Apple to found their company explicitly because they thought an M1 style CPU core would do well in servers but Apple wasn't interested in doing that.

it's not that apple will sell server chips. it's that developers can locally work on arm which makes it easier to deploy to severs. linus torvalds had a quote about this...

Linus' quote/post:

""" And the only way that changes is if you end up saying "look, you can deploy more cheaply on an ARM box, and here's the development box you can do your work on". """

(emphasis in original)

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpost...

Thanks, I did not know about this!

It’s wild to consider that my next computer (an arm M1 Mac) will be compiling code for mobile (arm) and the cloud (arm). I wonder if we’ll ever see AMD releasing a competitive arm chip and joining the bandwagon.

Now with NVIDIA owning ARM I'm not sure AMD will do that

Ah, ok, that makes sense.

Personally, I don’t see many server admins choosing to pay the Apple Tax to get M1 into their data center. I don’t see how the watt/performance ratio could pay off that kind of tax.

I did not mean to imply that the actual M1 will be used in data centers. Apple is quite popular among developers and its also a trendsetter which will probably lead to other computer manufacturers to adopt ARM for personal computers. So having more people use ARM on their personal computers will lead to more ARM adoption in the data center.

> Apple is quite popular among developers...

The great majority of developers use Windows or Linux according to every Stack Overflow survey from the past ten years. Only ~25% use a Mac.

I believe interpreting statistics from those surveys in this way isn't fair. There are so many developers around the world but the pattern of value/money generation by them is not uniform; in other words, a small percentage of developers work for companies that pay the largest share of server bills and penetration rate of macOS devices among developers of top companies is probably higher than average. (I'm not implying that developers who work on non-macOS devices, make less value because your device doesn't have - nearly - anything to do with your impact. I'm just talking about a trend and possible misinterpretation of data)

25% is still "quite popular".

If 25% of servers switch to ARM that is massive.

Ah, ok, I understand. Thanks for clarifying!

The OP wasn't suggesting Apple M1 chips in the data centre, but rather that Apple M1 chips in developer workstations will disrupt the inertia of x64 dev –> x64 prod. It will be easier for developers to choose ARM in production when their local box is ARM.

Apple have been hiring for Kubernetes and related roles. This may well be for their own devops for Apple services.

However I'd be amazed if they don't release some kind of managed service for running Swift code in the cloud. Caveat emptor, though.

I have a similar view of what Apple are up to. Too many high-profile hires to be purely toiling in the mines.