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Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#81

Post by tyingq »

technobabbler wrote: post #79
tyingq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru That sounds wasteful to me. Is that really the most common way for mac hosting companies to do it?

Do they have an alternative?

I imagine you could get 4 in 1U if you used all the depth, and perhaps more dense by putting them onto their side in 4U (maybe 5U..not sure how tall a M1 Mini is). I don't know to what degree cooling is an issue, where you don't want the exhaust of one feeding the inlet of another.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#82

Post by slimsag »

withinrafael wrote: post #56

GitHub Actions uses VMs. Not sure how they, and not Amazon, were able to pull this off. That subject is sensitive and reportedly under NDA. https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2604#...

I believe that Apple internally has plans to compete with AWS and Google Cloud in the long term, but with M1 chips. There have been rumors[0][1] about this, and it's a logical step.

Not a far leap to speculate that Microsoft/GitHub has been granted early access to that program.

[0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4466949-new-leak-suggests-a...

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/16/apple-planning-to-rival...

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#83

Post by ksec »

mciancia wrote: post #73
tyingq wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"EC2 M1 Mac instances are powered by...The Mac mini, featuring M1 SoC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory" So not $699, but $899, since it's 16GB of memory.

For retail, true. I would be surprised if amazon actually pays that much

Normal whole sale price, at best would be something like $799.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#86

Post by meatmanek »

DrBazza wrote: post #50
SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

Naive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or giant m1 MP servers?

I came here to ask the same thing. So if Apple don't make a rackable M1 server, what do they themselves use? It seems a bit unlikely Apple would have racks of minis as well.

According to a sysadmin I interviewed several years ago, they use standard x86 server hardware from other vendors like Dell. If I recall correctly (there's a good chance I'm misremembering), they ran something like VMware, and ran Linux and OS X in VMs.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#87

Post by GhettoComputers »

withinrafael wrote: post #56

GitHub Actions uses VMs. Not sure how they, and not Amazon, were able to pull this off. That subject is sensitive and reportedly under NDA. https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2604#...

Microsoft owns a significant amount of Apple stock.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#89

Post by runako »

tyingq wrote: post #68
droopyEyelids wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The space question is interesting. The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru. I think at amazon's scale they could probably get 4 minis in 1ru with some custom cooling. how dense do you think instances are on average in the amazon datacenters?

>The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru That sounds wasteful to me. Is that really the most common way for mac hosting companies to do it?

https://www.macstadium.com/datacenters

There's an image there that appears to have the units mounted sideways for perhaps 6 minis in 2 RU?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#90

Post by ksec »

slimsag wrote: post #82
withinrafael wrote: post #56

GitHub Actions uses VMs. Not sure how they, and not Amazon, were able to pull this off. That subject is sensitive and reportedly under NDA. https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2604#...

I believe that Apple internally has plans to compete with AWS and Google Cloud in the long term, but with M1 chips. There have been rumors[0][1] about this, and it's a logical step. Not a far leap to speculate that Microsoft/GitHub has been granted early access to that program. [0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4466949-new-leak-suggests-a... [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/16/apple-planning-to-rival...

I seriously, seriously doubt that.

Apple has needs for serving 1+ Billion of its customers. IS&T has been known to be a complete pile of crap ( plenty of evidence on HN alone ). A dozens of hiring seems more to me like trying to fix things rather than compete. The will need hundreds if not thousands as bare minimum.

They have been pitting Azure against AWS and GCP against Azure to gain extremely favourable terms.

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