How oxide cuts data center power consumption in half

I'm amazed Apple don't have a rack mount version of their M series chips yet.

Even for their own internal use in their data centers they'd have to save an absolute boat load on power and cooling given their performance per watt compared to legacy stuff.

(some of?) their servers do run apple silicon: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

For who? How would this help their core mission?

Maybe it becomes a big enough profit center to matter. Maybe. At the risk of taking focus away, splitting attention from the mission they're on today: building end user systems.

Maybe they build them for themselves. For what upside? Maybe somewhat better compute efficiency maybe, but I think if you have big workloads the huge massive AMD Turin super-chips are going to be incredibly hard to beat.

It's hard to emphasize just how efficient AMD is, with 192 very high performance cores on a 350-500W chip.

There is a rack mount version of the Mac Pro you can buy

I don't think they'd admit much about it even if they had one internally, both because Apple isn't known for their openness about many things, and because they already exited the dedicated server hardware business years ago, so I think they're likely averse to re-entering it without very strong evidence that it would be beneficial for more than a brief period.

In particular, while I'd enjoy such a device, Apple's whole thing is their whole-system integration and charging a premium because of it, and I'm not sure the markets that want to sell people access to Apple CPUs will pay a premium for a 1U over shoving multiple Mac Minis in the same 1U footprint, especially if they've already been doing that for years at this point...

...I might also speculate that if they did this, they'd have a serious problem, because if they're buying exclusive access to all TSMC's newest fab for extended intervals to meet demand on their existing products, they'd have issues finding sources to meet a potentially substantial demand in people wanting their machines for dense compute. (They could always opt to lag the server platforms behind on a previous fab that's not as competed with, of course, but that feels like self-sabotage if they're already competing with people shoving Mac Minis in a rack, and now the Mac Minis get to be a generation ahead, too?)

Oxide is not touching DLC systems in their post even with a 100ft barge pole.

Lenovo's DLC systems use 45 degrees C water to directly cool the power supplies and the servers themselves (water goes through them) for > 97% heat transfer to water. In cooler climates, you can just pump this to your drycoolers, and in winter you can freecool them with just air convection.

Yes, the TDP doesn't go down, but cooling costs and efficiency shots up considerably, reducing POE to 1.03 levels. You can put tremendous amount of compute or GPU power in one rack, and cool them efficiently.

Every chassis handles its own power, but IIRC, all the chassis electricity is DC. and the PSUs are extremely efficient.

I will add that consumer macOS is a piss-poor server OS.

At one point, for many years, it would just sometimes fail to `exec()` a process. This would manifest as a random failure on our build farm about once/twice a month. (This would manifest as "/bin/sh: fail to exec binary file" because the error type from the kernel would have the libc fall back to trying to run the binary as a script, as normal for a Unix, but it isn't a script)

This is likely stemming from their exiting the server business years ago, and focusing on consumer appeal more than robustness (see various terrible releases, security- and stability-wise).

(I'll grant that macOS has many features that would make it a great server OS, but it's just not polished enough in that direction)

> as normal for a Unix

veering offtopic, did you know macOS is a certified Unix?

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3581.htm

As I recall, Apple advertised macOS as a Unix without such certification, got sued, and then scrambled to implement the required features to get certification as a result. Here's the story as told by the lead engineer of the project:

https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

Companies buying massive cloud scale server hardware want to be able to choose from a dozen different Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers. Apple is in no way motivated to release or sell the M3/M4 CPUs as a product that major east asia motherboard manufacturers can design their own platform for. Apple is highly invested in tightly integrated ecosystems where everything is soldered down together in one package as a consumer product (take a look at a macbook air or pro motherboard for instance).

and Windows used to be certified for posix, but none of that matters theses days if it's not bug-compatible with Linux

Did that ever get fixed? That...seems like a pretty critical problem.

That's designed for the broadcast market, where they rack mount everything in the studio environment. It's not really a server, it has no out of band management, redundant power etc.

There are third party rack mounts available for the Mac Mini and Mac Studio also.

This comes up rather often, and on the last significant post about it I saw on HN someone pointed out that the certification is kind of meaningless[1]. macOS poll(2) is not Unix-compliant, hasn't been since forever, yet every new version of macOS gets certified regardless.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41823078

> Maybe they build them for themselves. For what upside?

They do build it for themselves. From their security blog:

"The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code Signing and sandboxing."

<https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/>

Yes, it quietly stopped happening a few years ago, sometime since 2020.

> I will add that consumer macOS is a piss-poor server OS.

Windows is also abysmal but it hasn't stopped people from using it.

But yes, it is too much of a desktop OS.

Rack mount models have LOM over MDM.

This is such a narrow narrow tiny corner of computing needs. That has such serious need for ownership, no matter the cost. And has extremely fantastically chill as shit overall computing needs, is un-perfomamce-sensitive as it gets.

I could not be less convinced by this information that this is a useful indicator for the other 99.999999999% of computing needs.

Good, because you can’t have one.

The in case PSUs I’ve seen them gesturing to in videos don’t even seem to have cooling fins on them.

I wouldn't run a Windows server, but at least it can manage a SYN flood, whereas MacOS doesn't have syncookies or similar (their version of pf has the syncookie keyword, but it seems like it only works for traffic that transits the host, not for traffic that is terminated by the host). Windows also has some pretty nice stuff for servers like receive side scaling (afaik, Microsoft brought that to market, or at least was very early).

lovely, i favorited that comment!

…Apple has made rack-mounted computers in recent history. They don’t sell chips, they sell complete boxes with rack mount hardware, motherboard and all.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G1720LL/A/Refurbished-Mac...

An extremely niche product for things like video editing studios, not something you can deploy at scale in colocation/datacenter environments. Literally never seen rackmounted apple hardware in a serious datacenter since the apple xserve 20 to 22 years ago.