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SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

group.softbank

21–30 of 134 posts

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#21
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A what?

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjfc118vn1e

perhaps you think this explains something but honestly it does not.

I mean, yes, these people are ex-israeli army, but why would Google want to pay 32B for ex-IDF people? Surely there's more of them out there?

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#22
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a server. It is a rackable desktop. You won't run general purpose server apps on this.

What is a general purpose server app? Does Apple prevent their users running applications which listen to outside connections?

I think the issue is that you'll have the base macOS system with GUI and all taking up resources.

Compare that to a bare metal install of Proxmox or similar.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjfc118vn1e

perhaps you think this explains something but honestly it does not. I mean, yes, these people are ex-israeli army, but why would Google want to pay 32B for ex-IDF people? Surely there's more of them out there?

Israel have National Service so pretty much every working there is ex-Army.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a general purpose server app? Does Apple prevent their users running applications which listen to outside connections?

I think the issue is that you'll have the base macOS system with GUI and all taking up resources. Compare that to a bare metal install of Proxmox or similar.

Yeah, I know, but given that you leave the user not-logged in and set the items system-wide startup items, the memory pressure on a 64GB system can be seen as negligible with some mental flexibility.

I think the primary use for a rackable server like this is automating building and testing of macOS native, or macOS specific applications you develop, or build them. Or as a shared remote desktop host for specific tasks.

Also we had (recently deprecated) macOS Server package for quite some time. So it's not unsuitable for servers. It's more suitable for specific jobs as a server.

Installing Linux servers are too easy now, so I don't think macOS should evolve a "server-specific" version either.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#27
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a server. It is a rackable desktop. You won't run general purpose server apps on this.

What is a general purpose server app? Does Apple prevent their users running applications which listen to outside connections?

have fun when that cheese grater hangs in the datacenter and you have to physically go in there to push a button, connect a display, a keyboard and a mouse to do troubleshooting, because apple in their infinite wisdom has decided that a rackable mac should not have ipmi.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a general purpose server app? Does Apple prevent their users running applications which listen to outside connections?

have fun when that cheese grater hangs in the datacenter and you have to physically go in there to push a button, connect a display, a keyboard and a mouse to do troubleshooting, because apple in their infinite wisdom has decided that a rackable mac should not have ipmi.

Why not use JetKVM [0], and a remotely switchable datacenter PDU?

[0]: https://jetkvm.com/

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#30
post #5

So Softbank now competes with Arm's customers and (unless I've missed something on new governance arrangements) also gets access to confidential information on Arm's customers' businesses (plans, volumes etc). Hmmm.

It kinda makes sense though, ARM has been creeping upwards over the years and yet afaik outside of Ampere no ARM server supplier has become serious (outside of inhouse variants such as Amazon Graviton).

So combining ARM and Ampere operations doesn't hurt any current big customers in the mobile field (apart from perhaps Qualcomm but they're in lawsuit mode there anyhow).

They also make sure to make the ARM alternative available to smaller customers (As an option besides AMD and Intel servers) instead of being gobbled up by f.ex. Oracle (making the big server ARM implementations inhouse to 2 of the big platform operators).

Not to mention the silver lining, combining the ops will give it more credence in the enterprise market that seems to have damn good margins (some have attributed AMD's resurgence and Intel's troubles to Intel slipping in server sales).

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