Since those high-end Mac systems won't be able to run in datacenters, what's the point there? You're pretty much at the mercy of whatever Intel, AMD and other ARM manufacturers release.
Well not sure about your data center comment. But it has gotten those making purchasing decisions asking about ARM based and their alternatives. Apple doing ARM lends legitimacy to other ARM vendors where previously the topic could lead to ridicule.
Apple should license the M1 core architecture to someone to make server chips with it. They'd make some extra money and lose nothing... in fact they might gain since it would build market share around the architecture.
If the massive bandwidth shared CPU / GPU memory approach is optimum on the desktop for many workloads then one would think that there would be a sizeable market for that in the cloud - after all many desktop workloads (video editing) for example are moving to the cloud.
Can’t see it being Apple but feels like an opportunity for someone.
Because Apple wasn't interested in doing that some engineers left to found their own company doing Apple style cores for serves. It was called Nuvia. It was eventually bought by Qualcomm who decided to try to use those cores in Mobile despite the actual designs not being suited for that. I feel like I shouldn't just spill Charlie's scoop on exactly why[1] but it doesn't look good.
These are seemingly MacOS only which doesn’t really qualify for the vast majority of data center uses. They’re here to build software for Apple devices and that’s pretty much it.
