Comment by cmrdporcupine
4 years ago
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).
POWER was not originally open for use by others, under any license terms. It also was on the trailing edge of performance for many years. The original POWER 1 and POWER 2 boardsets were enormous power-sucking bastards with price tags to match. (Yes, boardsets. They were not even microprocessors.)
SPARC and MIPS were relatively open from day one but there were fewer takers than you would expect
SPARC had a number of licensees, but most of them chose to either re-use Sun software (Fujitsu, Solborne) or sell their chips directly through Sun (Ross, Weitek)
MIPS had many licensees but it ended up being bought by one of its most successful customers, SGI. Turns out, controlling the product direction is pretty important!
The point is, there were a lot of market forces piling up to drive people to play their own game, even it looks very silly 30 years on.