Comment by hapless
4 years ago
SPARC rapidly became a performance loser to x86. And, at the time, Intel had no process advantage. None at all.
Intel Pentium II was almost exactly 100% as fast as UltraSPARC IIi, on the same process (350 nm), at about 1/20th the cost. That was the last competitive Sun SPARC product, after that they were all brutally slow. The less said about US III and US IV, the better.
By the time that Sun put itself on the auction block, their internal CPUs weren't even good enough for legacy customers. They were obliged to start re-selling Fujitsu SPARC products just to keep SPARC loyalists inside the tent.
You're right. When I compare SPARC with x86, they seem to have the same process node at roughly the same time. I probably meant manufacturing rather than process. Intel at the time was colossal. It was possible for an innovator like Transmeta to come along and develop low power. But then Intel could motor past them on a marketing promise, engineering and finally out manufacturing them. This manufacturing prowess was a lot of the reason for Apple's PowerPC to x86 switch in 2005. Moreover, advantage begat advantage until x86 ran into various walls.
Things have changed since and now TSMC, Transmeta's fab then, is the new colossus. And Apple has even dumped x86 for their own ArmV8 designs (manufactured by TSMC).
It really is amazing that Sun and HP had the hubris to design their own RISC processors in SPARC and PA-RISC; everything that was wrong with the Unix workstation market in the 90s can be summed up there, in a way. Proprietary CPUs and custom repackagings of Unix, all slightly different, but in reality they weren't different enough to justify. And this just left room for Microsoft and Linux and x86 to just come up the middle and make them all obselete.
Lots of vendors throwing around "open" this and "open" that but none of them meant it. Just try writing a GUI app for a Unix machine in the mid 90s. Motif was closed source, with licensing fees. Things like GTK and QT were still primitive. Xt was garbage. It was just a hodge podge of things with the assumption that anybody entering the market had hugely deep pockets.
If they'd all just united around POWER architecture at least maybe they'd have had a chance?
In the 1990s it actually made some sense. If you go back to, say, 1993, every RISC vendor was selling chips that were much, much faster than x86. It was working like gangbusters.
The problem is that development costs rose and rose and rose without bound. Even if you could outsource fabrication, just designing your chip would bankrupt you.
HP, to their credit, saw the writing on the wall. The Itanium started as a joint Intel/HP project. It was HP's attempt to get Intel to pay for their new generation of chips, and sell it to the broader industry, in the hope they could have a new generation that would be (somewhat) backwards compatible with PA-RISC, but get off the treadmill of escalating development costs.
It was a clever plan, but as we know now, it didn't work worth a damn. Practically nobody but HP actually bought the IA64 chips. Intel quickly realized it wasn't worth any further investment and let HP's badly-needed chip series wither on the vine.
Sun didn't even have that much of a plan. They kept making chips they could not afford, and when "Rock" threatened to bankrupt the company... they just gave up. Even though giving up also threatened to bankrupt the company.
All of this is true except that there was no need for every vendor to have their own RISC ISA.
Which is why I'm saying with 20-20 hindsight it feels like they should have all just piled in on POWER. Of all of them born in that era, it's the only one still around. (Apart from ARM of course whose target was something else. MIPS is kinda just on life support.)
I don't remember the politics around the consortium there. I guess it could be that Sun and HP and the others just saw IBM as too much of a competition to want to be in bed with them. But given most of these vendors had shipped 68k arch workstations previously, I would have thought they'd be down with Motorola's offerings?
The problem in the end is these people all saw the other workstation vendors as competition rather than the actual competition, which was Windows/x86 (and later, Linux).
1 reply →
Didn't the UltraSPARC lines have greater throughput as compared to x86 offerings, even when they couldn't keep up on single threaded performance?
Sun experimented with an UltraSPARC-branded ultra-wide CMT design in their last days -- Niagara. It was very unsuccessful, because, realistically, what can you do with 32 low-performance cores that you couldn't do with 8 high-performance cores?
The answer turned out to be "nothing"
------------
The "conventional" UltraSPARC designs -- US IIi, US IIIi, US IV, and the canceled "Rock" project -- were just really very mediocre chips sold at tens of times the cost of a similar x86.
Ironically Solaris with SPARC ADI is one of the few UNIXes where C is properly tamed with hardware memory tagging, while Intel borked yet again their attempt to provide such capability on their CPUs (MPX).