Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!"
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.
-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...
...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....
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.
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
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.
The Macintosh line would have been replaced by the SPARtan, leading to memorable models like the iSpart.
Anybody want a peanut?
"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.
Isn't that like, "I almost got laid with man"
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.