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SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

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Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#51

Post by ForTheKidz »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #8
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #2

Ampere is still the only people making a decent purchaseable ARM server. Not loving the idea of there being a bunch of new debt hovering over them now.

What about https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack#

Bro, come on. Apple hasn't even tried to pretend they're in the server game for at least a decade now. You're paying for dozens of features you'll never use. They don't even have drivers for their own hardware outside of fucking windows, let alone documentation about how their machines are intended to work.

I love my macs but apple will never be a cost or reliability solution to computation unless they do a complete 180. They're a boutique/luxury firm that can choose which markets they want to dominate. If you think there's not a small horde of people at Apple trying to figure out how to pitch bringing the xserve back, I have a bridge to sell you. But unless they can convince CTOs to become sysadmins it'll never be a viable way for a company as large as Apple to drive hardware development.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#52

Post by nazgulsenpai »

ahoka wrote: post #49
terinjokes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No BMC, severally limiting remote management, so operations teams responsible for physical servers don't want to touch it. JetKVM is a remote KVM, not remote management. It does not have the same integration into the internals of a server.

But it comes with a ... checks notes ... magic mouse!

Upvoted to save you, out of pity for this terrible joke. :)

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#53

Post by alberth »

klelatti wrote: 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.

Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips.

And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop.

So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#55

Post by jsheard »

alberth wrote: post #53
klelatti wrote: 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.

Isn’t Ampere essentially the only company making server grade ARM chips. And all the rest of ARM customers are making mobile/desktop. So Ampere is going after a completely different segment that the rest of ARM customers aren’t addressing.

They're the only company selling server grade ARM chips but others are rolling their own for internal use, such as Amazons Graviton line. That's Ampere's problem really, their biggest potential customers are so big that they can afford to cut out middlemen like Ampere.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#57

Post by ciupicri »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #8
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #2

Ampere is still the only people making a decent purchaseable ARM server. Not loving the idea of there being a bunch of new debt hovering over them now.

What about https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack#

There's no mention of ECC memory.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#58

Post by DeathArrow »

radicalbyte wrote: post #23
riffraff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These people are from an intelligence agency, not just army.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#59

Post by oneplane »

theshrike79 wrote: post #22
bayindirh wrote: post #18

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.

Proxmox runs fine on M-series Macs. macOS also runs fine with no GUI.

Either way, it wouldn't be a good fit when Ampere exists.

For low power modular compute, the way GitHub and Amazon re-package Mac Minis is not the moest efficient way to get Apple hardware in a rack with remote management (and still no ECC), but it does have a performance per watt and compatibility for macOS CI workers that you can't get any other way.

Ideally, this stops being an issue when the ARM64 ecosystem can build those apps natively. We're pretty close on that one, and it means you can use Ampere and Graviton for that.

Re: SoftBank Group to Acquire Ampere Computing for 6.5B

#60

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

lvl155 wrote: post #56

Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?

AMD has an entire line of ARM chips and there's an ARM in every x86 CPU they make. They've been making ARM chips for a long long time.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

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