Besides the technical merits of ARM, Alibaba's move may have to do with the US-China fight on technology. But it's good to know.
For ARM deniers, there's also this piece on Ampere Altra:
www.anandtech.com
Reading this should put to rest any rant that "ARM does not come in sockets", "ARM has no RAM slots", "ARM is memory-limited" (well, admittedly, there
is a limit: 4 TB per socket), "ARM does not come with PCIe slots" (will 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes do?), "ARM is for phones and tablets" (OK, I give up and pass on a 250W tablet with a CPU package the size of a small phone
).
Altra is a server platform. I wouldn't want exactly that in a desktop—and, with its current limit to 64 threads, OS X would instantly panic on anything higher in the stack than a Q64-33. But I still hope that the future "Jade" platform for AppleSilicon Mac Pro will look more like an Altra than like a M1 SoC.
I had missed the part on editing an insane number of ProRes streams on the M1 Max (30 in 4K, 7 in 8K vs. 23@4K, 6@8K for Afterburner), nicely hidden after the gloat on the revolutionary keyboard with tactile black keys instead of a TouchBar (Apple knows its priorities!). Well, that doesn't bode well for an interim update of the Mac Pro with Ice Lake Xeon W-3300, does it?