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Apple Nearly Moved to SPARC
taskforce writes "Sun Microsystems Co-Founder Bill Joy claims that Apple nearly moved to Sun's SPARC chips instead of IBM's PPC platform, back in the mid-1990s. From the article: "We got very close to having Apple use Sparc. That almost happened," Joy said at a panel discussion featuring reminiscences by Sun's four cofounders at the Computer History Museum. An account of his entire presentation can be found on Cnet."
Here we go again.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
What is this, digg.com with its 10 year old news? It was all over the media back when Apple was making their switch to the new architecture.
Nothing to see here, move along.
This is boring ... shouldn't we discuss what is ... instead of would could have been? If we start considering the almost but not quite and what would have happned if ... I think there enough useless discussion going on already!
almost only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
For serious workstations, the SPARC was basically the dominant chip at the time. Indeed, it was at the top of its game. Even now we still see it used for mission-critical and high-performance tasks. So it's really no wonder that Apple would have considered such a switch.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Where would life be today if gravity was just a smidgen stronger? Wow, all the thoughts just racing through my head now.
Sun Microsystems Boasts "We're not quite good enough."
The SPARC V8 is quite clean and nice to work with, and is farley sane, with the exception of tagged arthmetics, the trap model and the visible pipeline, and missing standard interface to the MMU (yes I know of the ref-mmu).
On the other hand, the SPARC V9 is a horrendeus monster thar is just plain scary when dealing with supervisor level code. IMHO the PPC64 is much nicer than the V9, in many aspects.
But, on the other hand the PPC, has gone out of order, while the SPARC has stayed in order, making the CPU a hell to compile code for.
Architecturally, the PPC is a slight bit nicer than the SPARC, and as a plus, the PPC64 was defined exactly the same time as the PPC32 was, and thus they (PPC32 & 64) are very similar.
In my eye, it was a good decision to go for the PPC.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
yup. why are we seeing duplicate stories on slashdot? does cowboyneal have alzheimer's?
There has always been much speculation as to what the computing landscape would look like today had the non-Intel vendors worked together to produce a superior chip.
Indeed, the combined talents of the Alpha crew from DEC, with the PA-RISC developers from HP, the SPARC group from Sun, those behind the MIPS at SGI and MIPS Technologies, and the PPC people from IBM, for instance, could have come up with a CPU that completely trumped what Intel was putting out at the time.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
..and Apple was about to. Sun was probably an obvious partner for Apple.
However.. I think going PowerPC was the by far best choice at the time with massive backing by almost everyone.
My take on history is that Apple have chosen the right processor architecture at any given moment taking account everything that was known at the time. In hindsight everything always looks different.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
-TFA-
"McNealy added that he went to Steve Jobs' house to try to hammer out the user interface agreement. The Apple co-founder and CEO was "sitting under a tree, reading 'How to Make a Nuclear Bomb,'" with bare feet and wearing jeans with holes torn in the knees, McNealy said."
---
From just this one anecdote one does get the feeling that Steve might have taken over Sun eventually. The disappointment expressed by Bill Joy over the failed "close encounters" with Apple does indicate that they would have followed Steves leadership.
On a more serious note, the clash of the raging CEO egos would not have been beneficial for either company.
# ~: no sigs today
There was a lot of speculation in the early to mid 1990s that SGI would buy Apple. SGI was doing quite well at that time, considering they had just released their very successful Indy line. Considering that both provided workstations for the same type of applications (multimedia-related, desktop publishing, and so forth), the systems from Apple could have offered a solid low-end line to complement SGI's more powerful systems.
What could have happened is an infusion of IRIX with Mac OS. We could have seen Mac OS on the MIPS, for instance. Not only that, but it would be a situation very similar to what we have now with Mac OS X: an excellent GUI built upon a solid UNIX-based core. Except in the SGI case the UNIX core would be IRIX, rather than a BSD/Mach conglomerate.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Oops, I may be in violation of an NDA...
being dispensed by the cashier.
Intel created either the 386 or the 486 chip for sun to use as their processor. It was so many times faster it embarassed sun and they stuck with sparc. Seriously. the industry is not made upon woulda coulda shoulda's.
close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades.
The parent post is an aphorism, not a troll. At worst, it could be offtopic.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...late '80s/very early '90s there was something called the ACE Consortium.
This was formed by the likes of DEC, Compaq and SCO at the time when IBM had not long brought out the dreadfully underpowered, expensive and proprietary PS/2 line of personal computers running the pathetic MS-DOS and mediocre OS/2.
Most people were running PeeCees which were essentially 16-bit with a single user, single tasking operating system running on dreadfully slow CISC (8086, 80286, 80386) processors will pitifully small amounts of RAM (512k-1MB) and nary a GUI.
The ACE consortium was designing a MIPS-based (32-bit RISC) open specification for a replacement to the IBM-PC and PS/2 architectured which would run a UNIX SYSVR4 derivative and a nice GUI (was it with X?).
The project died a death. I can't remember why.
When I was 15 I longed for a RISC UNIX workstation in the house instead of the 12MHz Compaq SLT/286 we had (for business use).
MIPS lived on in post-VAX pre-Alpha workstations at DEC and then at SGI. itanic Kool Aid all but killed off MIPS. The only two major RISC architectures from the era which survive are SPARC and POWER/PowerPC, and for a couple of years it looked like SPARC was dead too.
The spirit of Alpha lives on in Athlon and Opteron.
Stick Men
...that Sun are also considering switching to Sparc for their servers. You know, if things don't work out with the Opteron they need a backup strategy.
I kid, I kid....
The main problem x86 Solaris faces is providing driver support. intelMacs would provide a highly standardized and popular platform.
Logical decision since everyone knows that Sun makes Apples grow.
;)
Seriously, while it all a funny ring to it I wonder when we'll stop using real life verbs for computers. So move from jars filled with beans back to archives filled with programs
Apple's SparcOS or Sun's SolarisOS?
Any more information?
Sun almost created several great desktop window systems. Sun almost set a standard for web-based application delivery with Java. Apple almost picked Sun's SPARC architecture. Sun almost set the standard for server operating sytems. And then there are things that Sun achieved, briefly, and lost, like dominance of university departments.
I leave it to others to diagnose the exact causes of Sun's repeated failures. I can say this much for myself: I won't buy another Sun product again, ever, nor will I ever trust any of Sun's promises again.
Hmm, the topic is somewhat fitting ;-)
/x86 would run on that kind of hardware remains to be seen.
You're comparing different entities. In this case you should compare your intelMacs with Sun's released Opteron Servers. You won't see Solaris/x86 having a problem there either, but if OS X
I agree...while the two linked articles touch on the almost-merger and use of PPC over SPARC, one focuses on the merger/acquistion story and one focuses on the PPC vs. SPARC decision.
Half brother/half sister stories? Cousins?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I know you were trying to be humorous, but Alzheimer's is hardly a tasteful target; it is a serious disease that is a source of extreme pain for many people. Please be more conscious next time when attempting to crack a joke.
I leave it to others to diagnose the exact causes of Sun's repeated failures.
There's a certain arrogant complacency and aloofness from the "vulgar real world" within Sun's higher engineering echelons. Someone needs to tell Scott. I'm not talking about the Bill Joys of this world, but the prima-donna engineers who sit a couple of levels down destroying good projects at the review process because they didn't think of it first or they didn't get to do it themselves or because it was done by a different part of the company.
I'm sure this goes on in all large companies.
The main problem x86 Solaris faces is providing driver support.
That problem is being addressed and started with the Solaris 10 project many years ago. Solaris 11^H^H Nevada will again be a vast improvement.
Solaris 10 x86 runs better than Linux on modern laptops. Solaris 10 rules.
Stick Men
Isn't that kinda like "I almost got laid"?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why, do you have Alzheimer's?
Haha, there is great proof over at http://www.phooty.com/modules.php?name=News&file=a rticle&sid=37 about an Apple editor.
They should have gone with the Cell. It's even better than Sparc.
NOTE FOR THE SARCASM-IMPAIRED: This comment is meant as a spoof of the unavoidable Cell comments that come up in any Apple CPU discussion. The anachronism is intentional.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Most probably, the only difference today would have been that we would be reading about Apple dumping _Sun_ for Intel, rather than dumping IBM for same. Reminds me of an Isaac Asimov story called "What If-", in which a newlywed couple meets a man who owns a gadget that can show them alternate realities, if key events in their past had taken a different course. For example: Would they be married had they not accidentally met on a train ride, etc. They keep going back to different points in their past: The day they met, the date of their wedding, and of course, everything is radically different, which aggravates the wife to no end ("This marriage is just based on chance, an accident..."). Right before everything gets really ugly, the husband deparately says: "Show us what we would have been doing at this very moment, had we not met on that train", and, surprisingly, they see themselves, exactly as they are right now, sitting together, happily married.
I almost had sex with Farrah Faucett when I was 13 and she and I were in the same airport (JFK). Almost = we were both there and I certainly thought about it.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
... before they consumated their relationship with IBM (5 initiatives on offer, including one called Pink - the domain of then Apple employee and ex-VMS engineer Roger Heinen). KO was a big fan of the Apple Desktop Bus and it's simple connectivity, but vetoed Digital Semiconductor providing the chips. Or maybe that was Jack Shields in the Executive Commitee, who drove everything vertically integrated to go eat IBM's lunch by 2007...
Fokelore in DEC at the time anyway. How much of it was true may be a different story.
Ian W.
With the new Cool threads CPUs (up to 32 threads per CPU), with low heat and energy consuptions SUN is years ahead of competition. It would be interesting if Apple made a play on it.
Yeah, he forgot where he was posting
The Macintosh line would have been replaced by the SPARtan, leading to memorable models like the iSpart.
Anybody want a peanut?
instead of reposting old slashdot stories, how about posting future slashdot stories? like "SUN Almost Stayed In Business".. Or The little IBM that couldn't.
"McNealy added that he went to Steve Jobs' house to try to hammer out the user interface agreement. The Apple co-founder and CEO was "sitting under a tree, reading 'How to Make a Nuclear Bomb,'" with bare feet and wearing jeans with holes torn in the knees, McNealy said."
The next phase of Apple's attempt to take over of the world: iNukes with the most innovative and simplistic user interface that even grandmas can launch. All options can be accessed from a single scroll wheel. Target. Launch. Burn.
"What are we going to do tommorow night, Steve?"
"The same thing we do every night, Avi. Try to take over the world."
Sparcler.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
Otherwise we would have had the misfortune of the following -
Sun Java System Operating System instead of MAC OS X
Sun Java System Mail Client instead of Mail.app
Sun Java System Web Browser instead of Safari
Oh and yes Java apps would have looked the one and only one True Sun Way.
Thanks, God.
And I almost had a threesome with two supermodels.
Almost...
"here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss." - Airline Announcements, George Carlin
It's strength was it's ferocious clock rates that were enabled by abnormally deep pipelines and instructions that did relatively little (no integer divide!).
7 stages is not an "abnormally deep pipeline", and divide-step is absolutely conventional RISC design. The Berkeley RISC used divide-step. Sparc started out with divide-step. There really isn't a huge difference between Alpha's ISA and any other RISC, the difference is in the small details... whatever criticism you have of the Alpha, you can't in fairness leave the other RISCs out.
Alpha also had great execution control. The memory barrier instruction (also in Power, by the way, and eventually picked up by Sparc) let the compiler control the pipeline far better than Itanium's "I can't believe it's not VLIW" design or MIPS "just guess" delayed branch. And the huge register file gave the compiler much more leeway in scheduling instructions.
The biggest problem with the Alpha was that it jumped prematurely into 64-bit with both feet, so that even if the compiler generated 32-bit code (the -taso option) it was still moving 64-bit words around and throwing away half the result.
bah. The Amiga also moved from 68k lineage to PowerPC - back in '95 - with the 'PowerUP' range
of cards. featuring 603e and 604 CPUs. However, they almost chose to go with PA-RISC which
would have been a little more interesting!
The thing killing the non-x86 platform (theres certainly the operating system support out there
from Linux and BSD!) is the price of basic systems - you cannot go out and get a decent specced
system board with CPU like you can for x86 for less than 100 USD. theres no sub-$40 motherboard
and sub-$60 CPU.
Many of us have been keeping an eye on systems like the AmigaONE and Pegasos. Those with finances
and an eye for tech divulgance dont mind putting down $800 for an esoteric system. but its going
to be (quoting Dave Haynie) 'not more than a toy' - we need a....mmmm...breakthough on budget
systems that use alternative CPUs - and have the required horsepower for todays desktop demands.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: "It might have been."
(Sorry, I couldn't think of anything Whittier).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Isn't that like, "I almost got laid with man"
That's pretty much the way it went.
If the workstation vendors had picked a chip...any chip...they might have had a chance. Their combined investment might have countered Intel's, and their combined volume might have increased their economies of scale to the point where workstation price/performance remained competitive. (In the early days, this actually happened...around the Motorola 6800, which most vendors used, and which, for a while, held the x86 world in awe.)
In reality, each company had its pet chip, and both management and engineers were too caught up in not-invented-here to survive.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
It almost happened.
So, if innovative and creative are the name of the game, I'm actually surprised the Sparc was considered at all. The MIPS would have been a better choice, from that perspective as well as in terms of novel design. Not sure if the Transputer was still in circulation at that time or not, but that really SHOULD have appealed to Apple - parallel processing was starting to get people's attention and the Transputer was the best design out there. Arguably, in some ways, it still is - it is horribly difficult to get SMP to scale beyond 32 processors on a single node, but a High School student could build a 1024 processor Transputer block.
What other processors really stand out...? There were some interesting efforts to build processor-in-memory systems at that time - again, it would have been highly novel (which Apple liked) and would also have been fast (no delays in fetching from main memory). High-level processors (that could run 3rd generation or even 4th generation languages as the instruction set) would win on novelty, but never got anywhere, so would probably have fallen under Apple's radar entirely.
Asynchronous processors were also beginning to take off. Great for novelty, would have been superb from an IP standpoint (the rest of the industry wouldn't know HOW to clone them, even if they wanted to) but again really didn't make as much of a splash as a lot of people thought.
A better bet for Apple, actually, might have been to buy out a small-scale CPU manufacturer like Inmos and build a CPU that perfectly met their requirements. It would not have cost substantially more than buying the PPC from IBM, it would have given them "editorial control" over the instruction set, and they could have recouped the investment by selling the processor as well as the computer.
To me, that would have been one hell of a "what might have been" - a cross between Transmeta (ten years early) and SGI (who were doing very nicely at the time).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't know the hard figures, but I think SGI never really dominated the GWS market. They just got most of the press because a ton of Hollywood SFX were generated on their MIPS workstations.
The fact that Apple considered SPARC and settled on POWER has a certain pathetic fan-boy air to it. The Mac is supposed to be the ultimate end-user system, "the computer for the rest of us", a system that's really easy to use. Such a system is (in theory) mostly purchased by technically naive people who don't need all that extra processing power. But Apple always had to have the coolest hardware, engineering it themselves when they could, and buying the fanciest stuff when they had to buy off-the-shelf. Which is why their manufacturing costs used to be out of control, and it took them so long to get prices down where they could compete seriously with PCs.
Then again, the Coolness Factor has probably done more to sell Macs then any supposed superiority in usability.
HP PA-RISC 31%
Sun SPARC 25%
MIPS 20%
IBM RS/6000 12% (the architecture upon which the PowerPC was based)
I don't think most people consider "middle of the pack" to be a dominant position.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Installing it is still a PITA and the documentation is ugly. In Linux terms, Slackware ugly. In BSD terms, more labour intensive than OpenBSD.
Last time I had to download a kernel mode driver for my ethernet card. Quite a trick when you don't have internet. I actually got the driver working. But then DHCP by hand is excruciating. After that I just gave up in exhaustion and slapped Ubuntu and OpenBSD on the damn thing.
But given your comment I will try again. Maybe it's great once you get X working. Did I mention my video card?
What driver problems?
I've installed it on about 7-8 different machines and it's done great on all of them.
Solaris isn't intended as a multimedia, gaming, or use-my-latest-bleeding-edge-tech-toys OS, it's intended to provide a stable platform in order to get work done.
If you put it on a generic workstation or server box, it pretty much kicks butt.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
In other news, SCO nearly moved to actually producing a product.
Apple could have gone with ARM which might have really been a big win. The ARM family probably is the most popular RISC cpu on the planet now. No reason that the ARM could have an FPU or vector processor.
Imagine several XScale cores with some vector units all on a single die.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I worked at Apple at the time.
No, many processors were not considered.
The transition was to be to 88K. The engineers worked that out, and a IIsi with 88K chips in it was created for development. When the idea was turned over to the PHBs, the PHBs decided that switching to 88K was stupid and that the switch would be to PowerPC instead. Using PowerPC instead of 88K was called just "a packaging issue" by the PHBs, although it required a lot of effort since the emulator was written in 88K assembly.
The idea of moving to PPC was because 88K was only made by one company (who owned the IP), whereas PPC had the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) alliance behind it and the IP was available to all 3 (presumably Apple could make CPUs if the other two refused). Since SPARC was wholly owned by SUN, it would not have merited serious consideration.
Star Trek was different. Star Trek had no emulator, it only ran recompiled binaries. Actually, it couldn't run those either, it didn't run binaries, the demo was just the Finder and System compiled together in one big compilation unit.
Also, as far as I know, Star Trek was never officially demonstrated outside the 3 companies involved (Apple,Novell,Intel). There was only one group in the company (Gifford Calenda's) behind it, and they only had control over operating systems, not any other technology or evangelism. Although early demos of MAE (Macintosh Application Environment, which ran Mac apps on various UNIX machines) were actually the Star Trek code recompiled for different platforms. This is what Morris Taradalsky (sp?) showed at WWDC on an IBM RS/6000.
MAE came a bit later, it did have an emulator, but it was a different emulator than the PPC machines used. It ran on SUNs and IBM RS/6000s, I don't recall what else.
My guess is Bill Joy (or other SUN person in question) got MAE confused with the PPC transition effort.
Dont' forget the thermo-nuclear weaponry. Why is it no one ever gets that saying right...
"Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and thermo-nuclear weaponry."
--Neth
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Solaris 10 x86 runs better than Linux on modern laptops.
The wealth of evidence you have provided for this claim has totally convinced me. Some people say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but then they've probably never met a Solaris zealot.
>And, 8MB IS nothing on modern machines. Things have changed a little since 1998, you know!
When you go around making statements like that, its highly likely that "Java is pretty fast" statements should be taken with a grain of salt!
This is my sig.
Solaris x86/x64 uses the Xorg X server, so if your video card is supported on Linux it will work on Solaris also.
$20 Intel Ethernet cards work very well. nForce and Realtek drivers are included now too.
The above was a very informative comment, but was modded down as reduntant.
The download is free. So, download Solaris 10 and try it yourself.
Sun went through three bad in-house window systems before finally giving up and going with X-Windows.
I know about Sunwindows, and NeWS, so what were the other two?
Way back in the day, Apple almost sold to Sun. Java was nearly beat as well; Sun was using OpenStep in Objective-C first, but that whole thing fell through.
many companies implement it.
Likewise Power, but power is already running.