Mark Gurman is saying that Apple is working on a 40-core SoC for the Mac Pro for 2022.
You're Tim Cook, sitting in his nice office, looking at how much money you just spent to make this giant SoC for a relatively small market. In fact, you have to do this every year or every two years to keep the Mac Pro relevant. How do you recuperate some of this money spent?
You create "Apple Cloud". No, not iCloud. Apple Cloud. Like AWS. Where anyone can come and rent a 40-core M3 SoC running on macCloudOS. You get into the cloud hosting business. You file this under the "Services" strategy that you keep pushing to make Wall Street happy.
Soon, you'll be releasing 64-core SoCs with 128-core GPUs, then 128-core SoCs with 256-core GPUs, and so on. Somehow, you're actually beating anything AWS, Azure, Google Cloud can offer... without really trying.
Apple Silicon Cloud.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple is already testing their own SoCs to power their iCloud service, which currently depend on AWS. Apple was reportedly spending $30m/month on AWS in 2019. It might be $100m+ per month by now given how fast services have grown.
I'm EXTREMELY late at responding to this, so I know that people will say things I'm about to say.
Is this a possibility? 100% yes, this is a possibility of something that could happen. But it's important to acknowledge that while it's truly a possibility, I'd say there's a 5% chance of it happening.
I work in Cloud... for... about 10 years. Apple COULD do this, because if they did the cost per SOC goes down. Apple has their own virtualization tech in the M1, and I will say that it's superior to what Intel and AMD have done from an end user perspective.
Apple could very well do this, and if they did they'd have unprecedented control of their stack in a way that Amazon, and Microsoft, and Google can't match. They'd have 100% control of the hardware costs going into each rack.
Now, having silicon you can use is a huge benefit. Truly. But there is one other issue that they need to figure out to do it in true Apple style. They need the land and connectivity, and the cost to do that is so large I don't expect them to ever do it.
Apple could spend tens of billions of dollars to do this, and end up failing. The upfront infrastructure to do it could be high enough to actually hurt Apple.
Sure, they could use colos to kick it off, but the best way to do it is to own the dirt your silicon sits on.
I don't think Apple will do it in the next 5 years. Could or would they do it? Sure. Given an infinite timescale of course they would. Did any of us think 10 years ago Apple would launch a gaming service, and a TV service, and fund the production of movies? NO! I would have said it would never happen 10 years ago. Here we are today.
