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

Re:Had the workstation vendors worked together.

[dfghjk]

There's no reason to believe this at all. Adding more of the same level of engineeering expertise doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. Besides, it could be argued that all the processor groups you mentioned produced processors that were better than Intel offered at the time. They simply weren't enough better to make a difference. Odds are that combining the efforts of the competition would have made them all fail even sooner. HP joined Intel for IA64 and look where that got them.

a company of "almosts"

[penguin-collective]

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.

Re:a company of "almosts"

[Animats]

That's very insightful.

Someone should write a book on how Sun blew it with client-side Java. They gave the product away and spent tens of millions marketing it. In a marketing sense, they succeeded; everybody has a Java interpreter on their desktop. Yet almost nobody uses them any more. Why?

Part of the problem is that Sun's top technical people, including Joy, never really figured out GUIs. Sun went through three bad in-house window systems before finally giving up and going with X-Windows. Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.

So Sun ended up as a "server company", the place SGI went after they failed to survive the transition to low-cost graphics.

Re:Speculation that SGI would buy Apple.

[jandrese]

It always strikes me that if you listen to the rumors, there is ALWAYS a company gearing up to buy out Apple for one reason or another. I don't know what it is about Apple, but people really want to see it bought by some huge conglomerate for some reason.

I doubt SGI ever had any interest in Apple. They were positioning themselves in the server market at the time and Apple had nothing to offer them.

Of course that was back when Apple was tanking and speculation that everybody from SGI to Microsoft to Pepsi was going to buy them out.

Abnormally deep pipeline?

[argent]

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.