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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."
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.
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First, when the ACE Consortium was formed Intel was selling 486's. The 486 was not dreadfully slow compared to RISC competition although its floating point lagged. Intel PC's also had far more memory than you suggest and Windows (even OS/2) was well established at that time. The competition for ACE was not 16-bit, single-tasking low performance DOS machines like you say.
Second, Microsoft was a member of ACE and Windows NT was built to run on ACE machines as well as PC's. For those who wonder why NT/2000/XP boots the way it does, the reason is that PC's run special boot code that emulates an ACE bootstrap environment. It could be argued that ACE was the preferred platform for NT and MS internally built ACE workstations as reference platforms. Much of the NT code was developed on them. The ACE machines inside MS had EISA busses and used PC peripherals. ACE even included a spec that allowed ACE machines to use PC expansion cards with modified option ROMS.
It's conceivable that ACE intended the workstations to run a UNIX derivative but I doubt MS saw it that way. It's far more likely, had ACE succeeded, that its main platform would have been Windows. ACE machines, despite their MIPS processors, ran DOS applications! Sorry, ACE wasn't a UNIX workstation, it was a PC replacement that ran MS OS'es in addition to UNIX variants.
Now, about ARC---the PowerPC version of ACE...
ACE was formed in 1991. At that time the 386 was dead and the 486 was available at 50MHz. The Pentium was introduced in 1993. It was superscalar and offered integer performance similar to the best RISC processors of that day, certainly faster than RISC from 1988! Such comparisons are silly. Incidently, the first Pentiums were 60 and 66 MHz. It took another cycle and a different pinout before the Pentium went 100 MHz.
As for GUI's, OS/2 1.1 (the first with a GUI) was introduced in 88. Windows/386, the first fully virtual, fully preemptive version of Windows was introduced in 87. Windows 3.0 in 90 and 3.1 in 92. Windows was not the exclusive desktop at the time but it was certainly established. Compelling Windows apps that forced the PC world over to Windows started appearing around 92, not much after the creation of ACE. Word started dominating WP beginning in 92. There was still a lot of DOS use but the PC world was hardly as you describe (slow 286's and 386's).
Memory cost the same for PC's as it did for workstations. If anything, PC's with their compact instruction sets and small footprint OS'es made better use of memory than workstations did. Don't know what your point is there. Workstations had more memory typically but they needed it and their prices reflected it. Business ppl didn't buy workstations.
Claiming that the Athlon was substantially better than the P3 is silly. It had a slight IPC advantage and eventually a clockrate advantage, but the two designs offered similar performance. While the Athlon was introduced in 99, 8 years after ACE (not a good decade), the first of the P3 designs was introduced in 95, only 4 years after ACE.
AMD's Opterons aren't Alpha's and it's a good thing. Alpha's sucked and the P4 looks much more like and Alpha than the Opterons do. DEC had good engineers and contributed nicely to the PC world, most notably with their PCI work, not their processor designs. They gave use PCI bridges and a nice ethernet controller.
If we are comparing experience with these machines, my first PC was an IBM 8088 machine. I started work for a major PC manufacturer in 87. I did OS/2 1.0 and 1.1 work, UNIX systems programming and NT driver development. I did firmware programming work for that company starting in 88. My first machine there was a 10Mhz 286 and I used every type processor and most speed grades since then. I had extensive experience with the 960, Alpha, and PPC 603 in addition to all the Intel x86 processors. I worked some with the i860, the Moto 88K and the Itanium. I'm quite familiar with the history of the processors, OS'es and ACE. You can have your Slackware 486 machine. I got rid of mine long ago and wouldn't be bragging if I was still using one.
The event handling framework is quite complex (you can do practically anything with it) and the fact that each java class behaves almost like a dynamically linked library in more static languages will keep the start-up performance forever behind.
You might think so, but it really doesn't. Try the following: Install a significant Java application like JEdit or Moneydance. Time it's startup. I typically get start-up times of 3-4 seconds. That is faster than most KDE apps on the same machine!
The memory usage hasn't shrank since I was introduced to java. The extra hit that comes from the VM and GC is major pain in small applications but negligible in bigger ones.
I don't find this. I can start up trivial Java apps in just a few megabytes, and even Swing apps like JEdit can run in 8MB. That is nothing on modern machines. As for the GC being a major pain - it can be finely tuned these days, so much so that real-time APIs can be implemented even on standard VMs.
My impression is that performance and memory efficiency has improved significantly since Java 1.4.x.