> Maybe if Apple decides one day to manufacture the server CPU, which I believe they will not since they would have to open their chips to Linux.

They already are open enough to boot and run Linux, the things that Asahi struggles with are end-user peripherals.

> OTOH server aarch64 implementations such Neoverse or Graviton are not as good as x86_64 in terms of absolute performance. Their core design cannot yet compete.

These are manufactured on far older nodes than Apple Silicon or Intel x86, and it's a chicken-egg problem once again - there will be no incentive for ARM chip designers to invest into performance as long as there are no customers, and there are no customers as long as both the non-Apple hardware has serious performance issues and there is no software optimized to run on ARM.

▲

menaerus 2 days ago | parent [-]

> They already are open enough to boot and run Linux, the things that Asahi struggles with are end-user peripherals.

That's for entertainment and for geeks such as ourselves but not realistically for hosting a service in a data center that millions of people would depend on.

> These are manufactured on far older nodes than Apple Silicon

True but I don't think this would be the main bottleneck but perhaps. IMO it's the core design that is lacking.

> there will be no incentive for ARM chip designers to invest into performance as long as there are no customers

Well, AWS is hosting a multitude of their EC2 instances - Graviton4 (Neoverse V2 cores). This implies that there are customers.

▲

mschuster91 a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Well, AWS is hosting a multitude of their EC2 instances - Graviton4 (Neoverse V2 cores). This implies that there are customers.

AWS has a bit of a different cost-benefit calculation though. For them, similar to Apple, ARM is a hedge against the AMD/Intel duopoly, and they can run their own services (for which they have ample money for development and testing) for far cheaper because the power efficiency of ARM systems is better than x86 - and like in the early AWS time that started off as Amazon selling off spare compute capacity, they expose to the open market what they don't need.

	▲	menaerus a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, there's a different cost-benefit calculation. My argument was that there is an incentive to optimize for ARM64 because that translates to $$$. It's not only Amazon but Oracle and Microsoft too.

▲

rowanG077 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> That's for entertainment and for geeks such as ourselves but not realistically for hosting a service in a data center that millions of people would depend on.

Why not? Well form factor is an issue. But you can easily fit a few mac pros in a couple Us. Support is generally better then some HP or Dell servers.

▲

menaerus 2 days ago | parent [-]

Are you serious? But maybe you're not aware how such businesses are run - Linux is not officially supported by Apple and someone has to take the liability when something goes wrong, either you loose your data or your CPU melts down or whatever.

	▲	rowanG077 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Do you think HP or Dell will take liability? Tell me you have never dealt with any large OEM without telling me you have never dealt with any large OEM. No way they will take any responsibility for loss of life, data loss, or literally anything at all. The best they do is send some cannon fodder to replace the hardware if it fails. Perhaps it's different if you have a few hundred thousands of their devices running but my experience with small operations is that it's basically impossible to deal with them.