Apple could revive a legendary product it killed 13 years ago — heir to Xserve to run on M2 Ultra silicon according to reports but no sign of Mac OS X Server yet
Apple throws down the gauntlet at Google and Microsoft in the race toward AI domination
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Applemay be late to the generative AI party but just don’t count it out yet - as according toBloomberg’s Marc Gurman andMacRumors’ Hartley Charlton, the company will use theM2 Ultrain its own servers - in its own data centres - to power its growing GenAI ambitions.
Launched in June 2023, the CPU - as used in theMac Studio- remains the most complex piece of silicon ever released by Apple with 24 compute cores, up to 76 GPU cores and 32 AI accelerators.
The report neither mentions whether Apple plans to revive its defunct Xserve range of rack servers nor if it will bring back itsMac OS X serveroperating system. Both products have been mothballed for years as Apple moved its focus away from the enterprise market at the beginning of the last decade. A separate article from theWSJalso adds that Apple is using the internal code name ACDC (Apple Chips in the Data Center).
Another way to AI hegemony?
In their piece, authors Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie posits that Apple would use the formidable firepower of its data centers for training or for more complex inference while lighter workloads (or those that would require access to personal data) would be handled locally on the device itself, eliminating the need to run in the cloud.
This mirrors what chip manufacturers like x86 stalwartsAMDandIntelhave been advocating, in unison withMicrosoft, with theAI PCparadigm: big server chips (likeEpycandXeon) working in tandem with smaller client processors (Ryzen or Core). The difference being, of course, that Apple is using an existing processor rather than a new one.
Which raises another question; Did Apple plan this - having a jack-of-all-trade CPU family - from the onset? Bearing in mind that the M2 Ultra would probably be the only server processor in the world to have a GPU and an AI engine. Could it give way to a server-only version (the S1?) geared towards a data-center environment, with far more cores, no GPU and far, far more memory?
All in all though, there was never a doubt that sooner or later Apple would have started dabbling with server processors. It was a matter of when, rather than if. Reports of Apple building its own serversdate back from as far as 2016and is in line with Apple’s doctrine ofowning the stack.In 2022, the company also looked to recruit an “upbeat and hard-working hardware validation engineer” to “develop, implement and complete hardware validation plans for its next generation hyperscale and storage server platforms”.
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Then a year later,research carried out by analyst firm Structure Researchfound out that Apple was planning to triple its critical power capacity of its data centers to accommodate its two billion active devices (and nearly one billion iOS users) and deliver more services.
Of course, hardware requires software and Apple has been increasingly vocal over the past 12 months, releasing MLX, a machine learning framework designed specifically for Apple Silicon, a glimpse at anAI-enhanced Siriand anew suite of AI tools called OpenELMs.
It will be immensely instructive to see how Apple manages to do generative AI at scale using anything other than brute force GPU (à la H100). This may well have a direct impact on the fate of another trillion-dollar company calledNvidia).WWDC, the annual Apple developer conference,takes places next monthand it will have AI written all over it.
More from TechRadar Pro
Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
Turns out most of us really don’t mind data centers
How Agentic AI will revolutionize business operations – are you ready?
You’ve got until later today to vote for your Ultimate Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards
