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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."
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."
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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
Oops, I may be in violation of an NDA...
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...
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.
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.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
"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.