HiroThreading
Member
- Apr 25, 2016
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If Apple's processors are as good you say they are, they would be absolutely disruptive in the server space. Multiple generations ahead of anything Intel or IBM can come up with in terms of perf/watt (and even assuming Apple's clocks stay low, comparable overall performance considering how low clocked those massive core count Xeons are compared to their desktop brethren. In actuality, a 24-core up-clocked A10 would likely eat a 24-core Xeon for lunch).
No, not once you factor in things like quad channel memory controllers with ECC support, 40+ PCIE links, quad QPI links for MP scaling, hardware schedulers to manage 24+ cores and something like a bi-directional ring bus to connect the cores, cache, memory controllers and QPI links. Not to mention support that mimics x86 instructions such as AVX and AES.
It's part of the reason why ARM servers are struggling so much to get off the ground. Once you factor in a lot of the requirements of server CPUs, most--if not all--of the power efficiency of ARM designs disappear.
Yes, Apple is damn good at what it does. But there's a reason why the only players in the server CPU market are Intel and IBM (and Sun/Oracle if you want to count SPARC). It's pretty easy to underestimate the two blue giants.