Amazon now makes
its own processors for its data centers. With all the digital services Apple is offering, maybe they are contemplating the same switch. If Apple became its own Mac Pro customer, the product would instantly go from niche to high volume.
The overwhelming vast majority of Apple cloud services runs on Linux; not macOS. (some internal backend stuff on Solaris and some other BSD OS instances ). The one corner case where macOS has a substantive foothold is the new XCode Cloud service. But that isn't a giant dominating consumer of Apple's server data center floor space.
For Linux there is diminishingly small upside to Apple spinning their own versus just buying off the shelf from Ampere. Ampere already works (drivers in place, software ecosystem , other adopters , scales past 64 threads, etc.) Apple has no huge perf/watt gap there. The M-series SoC are quite skewed toward running macOS better. Alot of that carries over into running Linux ( and Windows ) well, but not radically better for multiuser , multentant server operations.
Apple buys there data center systems from folks like Supermicro , Inspur , etc. Those vendors sell Ampere systems already.
Ampere Computing® platforms are available for purchase through our ecosystem of partners including cloud service providers, systems partners, distributors, integrators
amperecomputing.com
Apple can just keep buying raw and/or "open compute" components from the same folks they have been doing bulk buys from all along. It really only a matter of when Apple wants to slide the new boxes into their data center. Not some huge internal R&D project. Similar thing for buying DPUs if want to 'copy' Amazon's hyperscaling work with Nitro. Just buy them off the shelf vendors selling to other hyperscalers.
And a very sizable amount of Apple Cloud services doesnt' even come out of directly Apple run data centers. Apple partner with Amazon to run stuff and can switch to Graviton whenever they wish. Apple does work with Cloudflare.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-cpus/
Apple's layers on Cloudflare can already tap into those Arm servers already with no magic pixel dust from Apple designed silicon.
Most of Amazon cloud services customers pay substantive amounts of money. Most of Apple's don't. Graviton has a very solid funding source. Apple's cloud services don't. (XCode Cloud is relatively expensive (to other Apple cloud service) , but not very large. )
XCode cloud is likely going to look alot like what MacStadium/minicoloc and other mac dev box in the cloud vendors have been operating for over a decade ... mostly a bunch of racked Minis. macOS isn't really licensed multitenant. It is licensed to sell more Macs. So Apple will probably use up lots of Macs also to do it. A bigger 'missing piece' is the Mx Pro Mini system not creating some "Graviton killer".
MacStadium was buying pallets of Mac Pro 2013's right up until Apple stopped selling them. The Mac Pro 2019 has some compute density problems for server rooms where floor space costs are not minimal. A Mini Pro or Studio Max will cover lots of needs. There will be some Mac Pros needed for customers on XCode Cloud with oversized needs , but that won't be some humongous volume number.
For example, if the builds needed more than 10GbE feeds to network storage. A racked Mac Pro with 20-40GbE network cards would help. ( in some cases 100GbE even more if could find a card with macOS drivers ). That is why there should be more work to add better I/O than just 4 x1 PCI-e v4 lanes and some TBv4 controllers (with x4 PCI-e v3 ). Apple missing just basic workstation I/O is a problem they need to fill.
There is some bigger synergy of Apple enabling easy to deploy VM instances from macOS to Linux data center hardware where they can do more "eat your own dog food". But that is going from developer workstations out to production equipment. Not making the production equipment. That is why the Apple virtualization framework is much further developed for Linux than it is for Windows. Apple is probably already eating-their-own-dogfood there from the start.
Apple killed off "MacOS Sever". If there are not in the business of making software for a hard core server , why would they spin up making the hardware? testing and build farms are a corner case where taking would could be done on a single user system and just doing more of it in parallel in a "on demand" fashion. A SoC that is faster at making individual systems do compile/build/test faster works outside the server farm. ( most 'developers' are using individual systems most of the time).
Apple's default network file system option is SMB/CIFS ( Windows/Samba ) ... macOS isn't the 'worlds best' SMB server out there. Remote source code control repository software like git ... again macOS has some huge advantage playing the server role how? (it doesn't. Which is one reason why XCode Cloud service doesn't really try to cover that at all. )
If Arm's Neoverse server core evolution program falls off a cliff into disfunction then perhaps Apple would have a strong need to "roll their own" sever SoC. Ampere is jumping off onto their own custom cores , so if they stumble and fall hard and there is nobody but Amazon there would be a problem. (Nvidia is rolling out on a Neoverse variant though ... Neoverse makes for a lower barrier to entry so will probably end up with multiple vendors long term as long as it is around to jumpstart new vendors to Arm server market) . There were/are several "apple has gotta do a server processor" notion threads over in the Apple Silicon forums. Those too feed off the suspect notion that almost all of the Arm sever momentum is trapped inside of Amazon (and their Graviton efforts). it wasn't then, but it is more public now. (which hyperscaler isn't publicly buying Ampere SoCs at this point is a harder service to spot. )
P.S. the Qualcomm/Nuvia vs Arm lawsuit also is demonstrative that Apple cannot just willy nilly jump into the server market. There is not lots of upside for Apple to radically "fight" Arm on the direction and development of the Arm server market. If Apple buys stuff then they are far more aligned than trying to swim upstream.
