It was worthwhile because in the end it taught them that they needed to do something like Apple Silicon. And hopefully the current memory fiasco will convince them that they need to take memory in house if they want to build what they need to build going forward.
I really don’t see any alternative long-term to not engineering and designing memory in house and collaborating with TSMC onshore in America.
Hopefully having an engineer from the Apple Silicon design group as the next CEO will pay off.
Maybe. Intel got out of the memory game baecause it became a commodity.
That said, I was involved in some research years back where there was the potential opportunity for memory optimized for specific purposes. Which didn't make sense for the vendor at the time. Apple's already doing it to some degree on-chip. But you can imagine it making sense for a vendor owning the whole stack which wasn't really the case for the vendor we were doing the research for.
We were one of the first Xserve customers (Xserve and Xserve RAID).
I do agree it was an experiment. Unless someone has firsthand knowledge, we won’t know if it was someone’s pet project, a market they wanted to be in to dominate Dell, IBM, etc.
However, I would not call it a failed experiment. One of the largest supercomputers (at the time) was an Xserve cluster. Nothing about the experiment failed.
I will tell you that Steve Jobs was not a fan of the Xserve product line. He did not support it, which meant its days were numbered. He stated Apple was a consumer company. Not a business enterprise company. The Xserve teams were soon disbanded not soon afterwards.
Without any inside knowledge--and I'd have to revisit a piece I wrote at the time during my prior analyst stint--it always felt like a bit of a sideline/experiment. There were a lot of dynamics going on at the time. Linux was really exploding (and improving). There was a lot of consumerization (especially on mobile) happening within enterprise IT; Apple didn't need to become an enterprise IT company to effectively reap a lot of the benefits both directly and indirectly. Servers were increasingly commoditizing onto dual socket x86 (with some outliers).