> 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?

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.

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.