> I doubt Apple would go so far as designing a low volume server processor for their datacenters. It is probably not cost effective.
They have the luxury of having enough cash, and enough profitability, to do things that have negative ROI. The recently concluded lawsuit comes to mind — there was no business case for not settling it at the earliest. They didn't settle at all, and took it to the US Supreme Court.
And if a secure architecture requires a custom-designed backend server farm, they can do it, and even probably make it revenue-neutral, by re-introducing the Xserve product line.
I don't think they will do a full-blown custom design, and the advantage of having their own hardware stack is that they can leverage existing technology, and make a few tweaks. And they must have been running at least designs on this possibility, because they do want to take notebook/desktop processor manufacture in-house in the medium term, and end reliance on Intel.
> The recently concluded lawsuit comes to mind — there was no business case for not settling it at the earliest. They didn't settle at all, and took it to the US Supreme Court.
I'm inclined to disagree. Apple is a global company, and many of its customers would not look favorably upon the US government being able to force Apple to decrypt their data. I actually think that Apple would have gone as far as to move a good portion of their operations outside the US and create separate legal entities to protect against this had they lost the case.
And while globally people tend to have mixed opinions of Americans, the US government and its three-letter agencies are almost universally despised around the world. Apple being seen as a willing cooperator with the US government (especially on the issue of privacy / espionage) would be a huge blow to their global brand.
A secure architecture is possible with IBM POWER. Unless they can save money building their own without hurting iDevice development, there is just no reason to make their own server chips.
They have the luxury of having enough cash, and enough profitability, to do things that have negative ROI. The recently concluded lawsuit comes to mind — there was no business case for not settling it at the earliest. They didn't settle at all, and took it to the US Supreme Court.
And if a secure architecture requires a custom-designed backend server farm, they can do it, and even probably make it revenue-neutral, by re-introducing the Xserve product line.
I don't think they will do a full-blown custom design, and the advantage of having their own hardware stack is that they can leverage existing technology, and make a few tweaks. And they must have been running at least designs on this possibility, because they do want to take notebook/desktop processor manufacture in-house in the medium term, and end reliance on Intel.