I worked at a company where one of the pieces of hardware we were building at the time used a PowerPC CPU (this is back in ~2007). We had a rack of Apple xServe for build and test. The xServe was nice pieces of hardware compared to the x86 kit we had, more like Sun gear in their attention to detail and ease of use.
At my current company we compile for x86 and devs can do a full build and test environment on their laptops (which are 95% MacBook Pros) but it is unclear what will happen when Rosetta support is pulled. Now the interesting thing is we plan to move our stuff over to target the AWS Graviton (and other cloud ARM cores) as those instances are cheaper for generally the same performance (for what was are doing anyway) so the point will be moot. There will be some crossover point where having build and test servers in a rack will be cheaper than doing it in the cloud. At that point having Apple ARM based servers would be a win assuming we can build a binary that works for Graviton, et.al.
They discontinued the X-Serve because they had no control and they canned Nvidia and AMD in time. The last straw was Intel their no on the iPhone chip led to the creation of Apple Silicon.
They also had no’s from Motorola and IBM before Intel. All of those conflicts contributed to Apple creating Apple Silicon, which in turn led to in-house modems, and several in-house custom chips for other Apple devices down the road, I anticipate it will also lead to some move in the memory area.
Apple sells a Mac minis to companies though - to the point that they were supposedly asked to avoid redesigns when possible so that new models could slot into existing rack solutions.
I worked at a company where one of the pieces of hardware we were building at the time used a PowerPC CPU (this is back in ~2007). We had a rack of Apple xServe for build and test. The xServe was nice pieces of hardware compared to the x86 kit we had, more like Sun gear in their attention to detail and ease of use.
At my current company we compile for x86 and devs can do a full build and test environment on their laptops (which are 95% MacBook Pros) but it is unclear what will happen when Rosetta support is pulled. Now the interesting thing is we plan to move our stuff over to target the AWS Graviton (and other cloud ARM cores) as those instances are cheaper for generally the same performance (for what was are doing anyway) so the point will be moot. There will be some crossover point where having build and test servers in a rack will be cheaper than doing it in the cloud. At that point having Apple ARM based servers would be a win assuming we can build a binary that works for Graviton, et.al.
I believe you will still be able to use Rosetta 2 from VMs, if local builds using linux (say via a devcontainer) are acceptable.
They discontinued the X-Serve because they had no control and they canned Nvidia and AMD in time. The last straw was Intel their no on the iPhone chip led to the creation of Apple Silicon.
They also had no’s from Motorola and IBM before Intel. All of those conflicts contributed to Apple creating Apple Silicon, which in turn led to in-house modems, and several in-house custom chips for other Apple devices down the road, I anticipate it will also lead to some move in the memory area.
Apple sells a Mac minis to companies though - to the point that they were supposedly asked to avoid redesigns when possible so that new models could slot into existing rack solutions.