macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt • Hacker News Board

Re: macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt

#301

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

_zoltan_ wrote: post #285

wtallis wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but 72x Neoverse V3 (approximately Cortex X3) is a choice that seems more driven by convenience than by any real need for an AI server to have tons of somewhat slow CPU cores.

there are uses cases where those cores are used for aux processing. there is more to these boxes than AI :-)

If someone gave me one for free, I'd totally make it my daily driver. I don't do much AI, but I always wanted to have a machine with lots of puny cores since the Xeon Phi appeared.

The justification is that processors cores aren't getting much faster, but what they are is getting more numerous - entry-level machines have between 4 and 8 cores - and adapting code to run across multiple cores is important if we want to utilise all those cores.

Re: macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt

#302

Post by bigyabai » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

mjlee wrote: post #292

bigyabai wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the in the world are you working where MDM is the limiting factor on Linux deployments? North Korea? Macs are a minority in the datacenter even compared to Windows server. The concept of a datacenter Mac would disappear completely if Apple let free OSes sign macOS/iOS apps.

I’m talking about using MDM with Mac OS (to take advantage of Apple Silicon, not licensing) in contrast to the tools we already have with other OSes. Probably you could do it to achieve a large scale on prem Linux deployment, fortunately I’ve never tried.

Well, be that as it may, it's quite unrelated to deploying Macs in the datacenter. It's definitely not a selling point to people putting Proxmox or k8s on their machines.

Re: macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt

#303

Post by _zoltan_ » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #301

_zoltan_ wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are uses cases where those cores are used for aux processing. there is more to these boxes than AI :-)

If someone gave me one for free, I'd totally make it my daily driver. I don't do much AI, but I always wanted to have a machine with lots of puny cores since the Xeon Phi appeared. The justification is that processors cores aren't getting much faster, but what they are is getting more numerous - entry-level machines have between 4 and 8 cores - and adapting code to run across multiple cores is important if we want to…

anybody writing single core code in 2025 professionally isn't very professional..

the core count doesn't matter. a top of the line Turin system has less than 1.4TB/s memory for the whole dual CPU system. A 2020 era A100 has 2TB/s.

Re: macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt

#304

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 3:42 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #278

rbanffy wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have a bunch of ARM CPU cores filling in the interior of the die The main OS needs to run somewhere. At least for now.

Sure, but 72x Neoverse V3 (approximately Cortex X3) is a choice that seems more driven by convenience than by any real need for an AI server to have tons of somewhat slow CPU cores.

[deleted]