| ▲ | chis 16 hours 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 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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? |
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| ▲ | spacedcowboy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | re-thc 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > That they sell to the public? No way. They’ve clearly given up on server stuff and it makes sense for them. Given up is not a given. A lot of the exec team has been changing. | | |
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| ▲ | erik 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | vsgherzi 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| last I heard for the private compute features they were racking and stacking m2 mac pros |
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| ▲ | jeffbee 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
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| ▲ | Melatonic 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do they run any of their own datacenter stuff ? I thought they just outsourced to GCP |
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| ▲ | rsync 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | sneak 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | doctorpangloss 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | the answer is even more boring, they use GCP haha | | |
| ▲ | solarkraft 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s quite interesting how „boring“ (traditionally enterprise?) their backend looks on the occasional peeks you get publicly. So much Apache stuff & XML. |
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| ▲ | xienze 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > rack mount hardware I guess they prefer that third parties deal with that. There’s rack mount shelves for Mac Minis and Studios. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's still a lot - particularly remote management, aka iLO in HP lingo - missing for an actual hands-off environment usable for hosters. | | |
| ▲ | xienze 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I know it’s not exactly IPMI, but don’t those little external IP KVM modules work well enough to do remote admin of Macs? | | |
| ▲ | geerlingguy 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | The annoying thing is there's no ability to control power (or see system metrics) outside the chassis. With servers and desktop PCs, you can usually tap into power pins and such. |
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| ▲ | jeffbee 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| thunderbolt rdma is quite clearly the nuclear option for remote management. |
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| ▲ | almostgotcaught 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I don't know what you're bemused by - there's no mystery here - you can read the release notes where it literally says this was added to support MLX: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note... Which I'm sure you saw in literally yesterday's thread about the exact same thing. |
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