Although there’s little evidence of them today, Apple made a long succession of Mac servers and servers for Macs from 1988 to 2014, and only discontinued support for the last release of macOS Server in April 2022. Its first entry into the market was a special version of the Macintosh II running Apple’s own port of Unix way back in 1988.
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These days, you can nab Xserves for pretty cheap on eBay, but since Apple doesn’t properly support them anymore, they’re mostly a curiosity for people who are into retro homelab stuff and the odd Apple enthusiast who doesn’t know what to do with it. It always felt like Apple’s head was never really in the game when it came to its servers, despite the fact that both its hardware and software were quite interesting and user friendly compared to the competition.
Regardless, if my wife and I ever manage to buy our own house, the basement’s definitely getting a nice homelab rack with old – mostly non-x86 Sun and HP – servers, and I think an Xserve would be a fun addition, too. Living in the Arctic means any heat they generate is useful for like 9 or so months of the year to help warm the house, and since our electricity is generated from hydropower they wouldn’t be generating a massive excess of pollution, either. I have to figure out what to do with the excess heat during the few months of the year where it’s warm outside, though.
I think the fact MacOS Server and their Xserve hardware has been discontinued may be a problem for that “great future in the data center”. LOL
The only xserves i would be interested in are the powerpc ones.
Thom,
When you say Nordics.. i guess you mean North sweden or Norway.. Live anywhere Norrbotten?.. I’m in Pite
I think he lives in Boden kommun, he has stated that in the past. I also live in norrbotten.
va fan … 3x från Norrbotten på OSnews… ändå lite coolt 🙂
> When you say Nordics.. i guess you mean North sweden or Norway..
Generally, in English, “the Nordics” is a way to inclusively group Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, *and Finland*.
The reason for it is that people in the English-speaking world often used to say “Scandinavia” and people from Scandinavia then object that Scandinavia does not include Finland.
(I am sensitive to this, because I was once engaged to a Norwegian and have spent a lot of time in Norway. Jeg også snakker en litt norsk… och jag taler liten Svenska, men inte så mycket.)
I certainly remember folks swooning over the xserve design. I remember wanting a Cobalt Raq or Cube lol. Remember when cubes were all the rage?
I remember that too, but outside of a couple of clients I had in the High End Graphics Arts industry hardly anybody I know purchased one.
The ARM Mac Minis actually make pretty compelling little cluster servers if you have a separate big storage box and put Asahi Linux on them. They make next to no noise and you can stack them about ten high without causing any issues. If the Linux drivers for the GPUs and NPUs were any good you could probably do some funny AI/ML or mining with them.
That’s a lot of money to spent if you go down the Apple ARM route, you could spend 1/10th the price building a Pi 5 HPC cluster, or even the new compute module going a step further. Just buy one Apple ARM to act as the client!
So much of this hardware is bloated now, I was reading a new manual for one of the processors recently, over a thousand pages of specialised command and control, 90% of it you’ll never use, and next year they add a bunch of new features 90% of which you’ll never use. I suspect hardware with just the basic 10% we need could be made for pennies. I could spend a lifetime learning that hardware, but next year it will be obsolete.
cpcf,
IMHO the idea behind the apple ARM route would be the get high performing nodes. And “the client” would be any computer that can SSH into the nodes, If you’re running a linux client then there’s really no need for that one to be an apple ARM especially if everything else is PIs.
Apple (as well as other) processors have a lot of application specific accelerators. Some applications benefit from these custom accelerators, helping them perform a lot better than they would running on the generic CPU. But most average applications are less likely to benefit from these specific accelerators. They may not even be documented or usable by FOSS. And so naturally many of us would prefer for any extra transistors to go towards more generic cores instead. However a subtle arises even if they build it…unlike a CPU with tons of application accelerators, it’s a virtual guarantee that users will try to run all the general purpose CPU cores at the same time…because obviously this is the point, but things would just become extremely thermal throttled especially in the case of apple’s hardware configuration.
If there is extra transistor capacity, then personally I like the GPU model of concurrency over the CPU model. CPUs don’t scale as well because the complex pipelines end up with more overhead per unit work. Scaling up the cores also scales up the overhead. CUDA parallelism is extremely effective, it’s regrettable that a proprietary standard is winning out though 🙁
The Pi 5 is much slower in CPU, in disk I/O, in memory bandwidth, and network I/O. The local SSDs also serve as good fast cache for swap if you’re under memory pressure, which the Pis simply can’t do. The Mac Minis are closer in FLOPS/W to a proper x86 system and in FLOPS/$ if you buy the base models, particularly used on eBay.
runciblebatleth,
PIs can be useful to demonstrate concepts, but this is why I wouldn’t choose PIs for a real HPC cluster. Of course people can do it for the sake of doing it, but it will be far from optimal.
Thom Holwerda,
Indeed, it’s rather convenient when the heat byproducts of electrical inefficiencies is actually useful.
It certainly would not be worth the effort, but technically you could create a water loop to ether preheat your hot water. If the reservoir isn’t big enough and the loop still gets too hot for your electronics, than a heat pump would do the trick. The idea being that you’d use energy to heat the water away so you might as well take that heat away from the electronics.
Linus tech tips followed an extremely low tech approach using pool water. As is customary for him, he makes several mistakes that properly trained engineers could have saved him from, but at least others can learn from his mistakes. Alas, his wealth allows him to fund projects that are beyond the reach of regular working class folks. I don’t have a pool, or my own house for that matter.
Electric price in zone1 of sweden is currently 3öre per kwh. That is 0,0026 EUR or 0,0027 USD.
NaGERST,
Wow…really? Most of that’s green energy too, right? I feel like we’re so far behind. We keep electing corrupt corporate stooges are opposed to investing in any initiatives that improve society. They’d rather tear it all down in favor of handouts for our wealthy corporations.
More articles like this, fewer on social justice garbage. If I want to be lectured on social justice I’ll go to Huffpo/Buzzfeed/WaPo and read the same articles along with Thom.