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Are Servers Next for Apple?
With the impressive performance and low power usage of the M1 chip, could Apple begin building chips for the server market? And if not, what is stopping them?
Okay, so we know that Apple’s M1 chips are really fast. What is stopping them from also taking over the server market in the future with their own chips? To answer this question I will cover a number of different topics:
- What makes a good server chip? Will a server make different demands on a microprocessor compared to a desktop computer?
- A comparison of ARM and x86 business models, to better understand how competitors in the ARM chip market operate in a fundamentally different way from x86 competitors.
- What does the ARM competition look like? We will look at some high profile ARM chip makers: Amazon and Amphere. What is their technology and business model? How do they stack up against Apple’s M1?
- A paradigm shift is ongoing in manufacturing. Chips are not made the same way anymore. In fact nothing is. How will this affect the development of the market over time?
- What advantages and disadvantages does Apple have entering the server market? We will discuss Apple’s unique vertical integration advantage.
- How Apple’s unique advantages in the consumer market may actually work against them in the server market.
What makes a Good Server Chip?
In the server market there are many different workflows. As discussed in my Why is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast story, servers often have very different needs from a desktop computer. There I used the example of how servers could have multiple requests from multiple users. These requests are frequently not CPU intensive. E.g. serving up a web page or getting data from a database is not CPU intensive. In this case being able to carry out multiple tasks in parallel is more important. Thus CPUs with lots of cores are very advantageous.
