The Fruity Cargo Cult Apple is considering another stab at making hugely overpriced enterprise servers for CTOs with more money than sense.
According to The Information’s deep throats Job’s Mob has been developing a server aimed at AI developers, businesses and governments. The machine is pencilled in for 2029.
Two versions are being considered. The smaller box would cluster two planned M8 Ultra chips, while the larger one would use four, presumably.
The M-series Ultra is Job’s Mob’s highest-performance processor line and already powers machines such as the Mac Studio. The proposed servers would drag that silicon out of the designer’s office and into racks where people care rather more about uptime than brushed aluminium.
Apple has discussed using Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion to connect the processors. The technology combines switches, chiplets and software so multiple chips can communicate.
NVLink began as plumbing for Nvidia’s processors, but the company has been opening it to firms building rival AI silicon. Some Job’s Mob engineers reportedly reckon Nvidia offers the best connectivity option.
Job’s Mob chief executive John Ternus backed the server effort when it began roughly a year ago, while he still headed the company’s hardware engineering operation. He saw an opportunity in growing demand for Apple hardware among AI developers, who thought Macs could do more than display keynote slides.
AI labs have been buying tens of thousands of Mac mini and Mac Studio systems, while other customers are using them for security camera analysis and cloud computing.
The buying spree has contributed to shortages of some Mac hardware. Mac revenue rose nearly 29 per cent to $10.4 billion in Job’s Mob’s most recently reported quarter, making it the outfit’s fastest-growing product segment and giving Cupertino another reason to rediscover the enterprise market it previously wandered away from.
Consumer Macs, inconveniently, lack several things enterprises prefer, like particularly robust remote management. Job’s Mob already builds servers for its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, but its connectivity technology is reportedly too slow and expensive for large deployments.
A deal with Nvidia would represent quite a thaw in a relationship that has spent years sitting in the freezer. Nvidia senior director of high-performance computing and AI infrastructure Dion Harris declined to say whether Job’s Mob was an NVLink Fusion customer.
“We would always rather sell something than nothing… Apple has always been a great customer and partner of ours,” he said.
The target appears to be AI inference rather than training, particularly customers wanting models on their own hardware instead of public clouds. Job’s Mob previously sold its Xserve between 2002 and 2011, first with IBM processors and later Intel chips, before deciding enterprise servers were apparently insufficiently shiny and wandering off for 15 years.
