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."

Comments

Good decision

[lordholm]

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.

Re:Fine dining

[Megane]

Actually, "Happy Meal Ethernet" is the 100Mbit sequel to the 10Mbit "Big Mac Ethernet".

static void happy_meal_tcvr_write(struct happy_meal *hp,
unsigned long tregs, int reg,
unsigned short value)
{
int tries = TCVR_WRITE_TRIES;

ASD(("happy_meal_tcvr_write: reg=0x%02x value=%04xn", reg,
value));

/* Welcome to Sun Microsystems, can I take your order please? */
if (!hp->happy_flags & HFLAG_FENABLE)
return happy_meal_bb_write(hp, tregs, reg, value);

/* Would you like fries with that? */
hme_write32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME,
(FRAME_WRITE | (hp->paddr ...