Should Apple have courted Sun's SPARC instead of x86-64?

sonadowsonadow
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
i think we all know how tightly Apple controls the hardware and the software back in the PowerPC days. Ever since they made the jump to Intel, quite a reasonable amount of that control has been lost.



With that in mind, do you think Sun's SPARC architecture would have been a better alternative for Apple to have jumped on instead of the x86-64? At the very least, with SPARC, they will still have tight control over both hardware and software and wont have to worry so much about people 'hacking' or ptaching OS X to run on generic box PCs. Furthermore, if Apple jumps to SPARC, Sun will then have to develop more efficient and competitive mobile chips to supply Apple, which means more revenue for them.



what do you think?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    akacakac Posts: 512member
    No, because the same major issues would exist. And there would be no Bootcamp and VMWare and Parallels which would have jump-started Mac purchasing like it has.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    majormattmajormatt Posts: 1,077member
    No, X86 is better. (I cant believe Im saying this)



    We no longer have to worry about our processor speeds falling the to the wayside, we never have to worry about our processors going extinct. We may never be able to claim faster performance, but we are in a much safer, much more compatible connection to the world.



    I'd say this is the best thing Apple has ever done. The PPC and the G5 were good chips, it's just a shame they never got the development attention. We lost a little but gained alot in this transition.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    backtomacbacktomac Posts: 4,579member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sonadow View Post


    Furthermore, if Apple jumps to SPARC, Sun will then have to develop more efficient and competitive mobile chips to supply Apple, which means more revenue for them.



    what do you think?



    Yea because IBM and Freescale did a rilly, rilly good job of making mobile chips for Apple.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    mydomydo Posts: 1,888member
    Sun is using ADM and Intel these days for desktops.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    john.bjohn.b Posts: 2,742member
    Oh good Lord no! From a former owner of two UltraSPARC boxes, no it wasn't like the SPARC platform was in any way/shape/form keeping up with the advances made with the Intel/AMD architecture. As confirmation, Sun sells an awful lot of Solaris running on the x86 (x64, really) platform. Once-upon-a-time I used to be one of Sun's biggest fans, until they ran the platform into the ground. The moves they have made to try to keep Solaris relevant are IMO too little/too late (which OBTW is a very sad truth to me, but a truth none-the-less).



    I've said it before and I'll say it again here: OS X is what desktop UNIX could have been and is what Linux should have been.



    Finally, I agree with the others here that say Apple's moving OS X to the Intel CPUs significantly jump-started the "switchers" migration to Macs -- a group that includes me. (The fact that OS X has BSD underpinnings similar to SunOS was also a huge factor.)
  • Reply 6 of 6
    randianrandian Posts: 76member
    Do I prefer SPARC to the botch that is x86? Sure. I'm also a big-time MIPS supporter (SGI > Sun). Unfortunately going x86 was a far better business decision even though it's a vastly inferior technical decision. Apple has little incentive to spend its own dollars on cpu R&D when it can leverage Intel's for free. I'd love to see what a SPARC or MIPS R10k could do with that kind of development, but alas it's not to be.
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