OpenAI Hoarding Tens Of Thousands Of Apple Mac mini And Mac Studio Devices, As ASUS And MSI Burn Through Their Entire First Batch Of NVIDIA RTX Spark Chip And Beg For More.

Seems like Apple‘s little gambit to be immune to AI price fixing savagery didn’t work as well as they thought it would…

I guess Rosetta 2 was just too good…

Rosetta 2 is irrelevant here because they’d just compile their shit for ARM for better performance.

At least unlike B300s, these can one day be used if OpenAI dumps them on the used market. IF they do that instead of trashing them to make sure everything stays expensive.

True, but getting there probably involves using Rosetta 2 to arrive at a solution for taking full advantage of the Apple Silicon SoC memory exchanges and other Apple proprietary stuff. Those chips aren’t bog-standard ARM chips and the Asahi Project (bless their hearts) have barely broken into the M3 chips— so… if OpenAI are leveraging Apple Silicon from the last year or 2, they’re building out their own solution using Rosetta as some sort of bridge.

Edit: which also means they must be getting help from Apple directly, ew. And that really pisses me off, because I have long maintained that Rosetta should be open-sourced.

I don’t understand why Rosetta has to be involved in any way at all.

Apple provides APIs for programming low level GPU instructions, including AI workloads, on their chips, using the Metal API. Anyone interested in using Apple hardware to its full potential can just write Mac-native software, same as any other MacOS native software directly compiled as binaries to run on Mac M series chips. No Rosetta required for translating x86 instructions to ARM, when the whole thing compiles for Apple’s native instructions in the first place.

Uhh, you’re skipping a few steps

Steps that either would not work between architectures or that Rosetta would handle (thereby answering your own question)

And I’m not here to teach a computer science class

Steps that either would not work between architectures or that Rosetta would handle (thereby answering your own question)

What? They would compile the code that they control for the M-series architectures. The target architecture is M-series ARM chips running on MacOS.

Rosetta is for translating x86 to ARM. Which wouldn’t be necessary because there are no x86 binaries involved at all.