On: Supermicro throws its weight behind Arm servers

[FredPret]

I had one of those behemoth AMD dozen-core CPU's with 64gb of RAM, in a desktop. My basic M1 blows it out of the water in terms of how fast it feels.

Some workloads are obviously faster on the big PC, but I haven't been this excited about a CPU since the Pentium 1.

[15155 → FredPret]

I have a 3990X + 256GB RAM workstation with NVME drives.

My M1 Max MBPs absolutely do not "feel as fast" - but definitely feel proportionately faster for the cost.

[FredPret → 15155]

That's quite the workstation!

I use my laptop as a thin client and have compute jobs running on the PC, which is now a Linux server. Best of both worlds I think.

[rbanffy → FredPret]

> I use my laptop as a thin client and have compute jobs running on the PC

Same arrangement as here. I wish I could transparently overflow to cloud when the local server gets bogged down by my demands.

[15155 → FredPret]

I use my M1 Max MBP as a thin client, incidentally.

I have XRDP setup, but primarily use the machine heedlessly.

[nordsieck → FredPret]

I just really appreciate how quiet it runs. I basically never hear the fan, and I remember having to pin the fan in my old Macbook to max to force it to adequately cool the machine.

[rbanffy → nordsieck]

> pin the fan in my old Macbook to max

At the office we all joked that the MBPs were preparing to take off.

[bdittmer → FredPret]

My personal macOS "machine" is a VM running on a supermicro threadripper pro board (along with a Linux desktop VM + random LXC/VMs). The macOS VM is significantly faster than my M1 Pro work system. I should run some benchmarks.

[bryanlarsen → FredPret]

The M1 has a lot more transistors per core than the AMD, so which is the behemoth?

[FredPret → bryanlarsen]

The one that:

- costs more

- plugs into the wall

- cannot easily be moved

- sounds like a helicopter!

[pdimitar → FredPret]

Is cooling the 3990X really that noisy?

[FredPret → pdimitar]

I have a lower model but yes, it’s super annoying