Apple announced their new high-end Mac Pro desktop with 24 CPU cores, up to 76 GPU cores, 192 GB memory and 800GB/s of system memory bandwidth (for comparison: the top end infiniband, if I am not mistaken, is 400GB/s !). The price, I hear, is $10k US.
The specs are slightly ridiculous (100 cores and memory larger than some of the biggest boxes on AWS). This calls the question – are we ready for a DuckDB-like movement to application servers running under our desks? Just like it was in the 2000s with the Sun Sparcs and the Unixwares and the baby-AS400s.
But nowadays, of course, with more modern app servers – Flink, Spark, even the good old Apache Beam.
Obviously, you would not run a production process that generates your payroll on a box near where your most dedicated employees take a nap or have a snack.
But what if these high-performance desktops running new, modern app servers were organized in a mesh, exchanged jobs using a standard API, and were put to a better use than generating bitcoin ? Mind blown.
