ex-Apple CEO says they should've gone x86 in the 80's

Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:

http://www.computerweekly.com/articl...rch =&nPage=1

or,

http://makeashorterlink.com/?P5CC21826

Yousuf Khan

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in
message le.rogers.com...
Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:



Interesting, maybe another 10 years from now another ex-CEO will say "we
should have made it an open system in the late 90's.



http://www.computerweekly.com/articl...rch =&nPage=1

or,

http://makeashorterlink.com/?P5CC21826

Yousuf Khan

"Beemer Biker" wrote in message
...
"Yousuf Khan" wrote in
message le.rogers.com...
Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count
on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:

Interesting, maybe another 10 years from now another ex-CEO will say "we
should have made it an open system in the late 90's.

One can only wonder. In the late 80's, Intel was just introducing their
first 32-bit processor, the 80386. But that was still just a scalar,
one-instruction per cycle (at best) processor with no cache. At that time,
the Mhz speed king was the Alpha, and most people rightly assumed that it
would be the first to reach the 1Ghz speed rating. Little did they know that
an x86 cloner, AMD, would be the first to 1Ghz; and that the whole x86
market segment would be quickly undergoing revolutionary evolutions (now is
that an ironic phrase, "revolutionary evolution"). Within one generation of
the 386, they had the processors with FPU and caches onboard (486). Within
two generations, they had superscalar processors (Pentium). All the while,
all of this upgrade technology was being financed by the incredible volume
of the previous generations.

Yousuf Khan

On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 23:43:25 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:
"Beemer Biker" wrote in message
...
"Yousuf Khan" wrote in
message le.rogers.com...
Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count
on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:

Interesting, maybe another 10 years from now another ex-CEO will say "we
should have made it an open system in the late 90's.

One can only wonder. In the late 80's, Intel was just introducing their
first 32-bit processor, the 80386. But that was still just a scalar,
one-instruction per cycle (at best) processor with no cache. At that time,
the Mhz speed king was the Alpha,

I think you've got your dates off by a bit there. The 386 was
released in 1985, while the Alpha didn't come out until 1992 as best
as I can tell (though historical info about the Alpha has become a bit
tough to come by). By the time the Alpha made it to market, the 486
was already a pretty mature design and the Pentium was just around the
corner.

Of course, in the mid-80s, RISC was definitely the design of the
future, or so it would seem. The first commercial RISC chip was
probably a MIPS chip, circa '86, though I'm sure that there are many
other chips out there that claim to be the "first RISC chip" in one
way or another.

and most people rightly assumed that it
would be the first to reach the 1Ghz speed rating.

If it hadn't been for mass bungling and mismanagement at Digital,
along with some pretty serious problems when it came to actually
MAKING the processors instead of just designing them, Alpha would have
been the first to reach 1GHz.

Little did they know that
an x86 cloner, AMD, would be the first to 1Ghz; and that the whole x86
market segment would be quickly undergoing revolutionary evolutions (now is
that an ironic phrase, "revolutionary evolution"). Within one generation of
the 386, they had the processors with FPU and caches onboard (486). Within
two generations, they had superscalar processors (Pentium). All the while,
all of this upgrade technology was being financed by the incredible volume
of the previous generations.

Pretty much. It's tough for companies to compete against x86 when
they have trouble reaching 1% of Intel's volume. AMD gets by with
about 1/5th of Intel's volume, and they haven't exactly done well
financially for some time now. Just think of how tough it has to be
for companies like Sun who only manage to sell something on the order
of 1 chip for every 10,000 that Intel sells. Even with dramatically
higher costs (and therefore profit) per chip it becomes REAL tough to
finance the development.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

Apple would've done well to go into partnership with Acorn over the ARM CPU
platform, but I doubt Acorn would've liked that very much. Acorn were like that.

On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 18:55:34 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:

Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:

Sculley should have stayed at Pepsi!!:-)

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

In article
ogers.com,
"Yousuf Khan" wrote:

Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:

All that would have been needed to make the transition to x86 practical
would have been an x86 processor that was a few times faster than any
current or near-term 68K processor, so it could emulate the 68K
processor with adequate speed. Otherwise, all existing Mac apps would
have run uselessly slowly on the x86 Macs.

Scully is famous for bad decisions, both business and technical. This
would be another one. No one counted on AMD forcing Intel to make
faster, cheaper processors 6 or 8 years down the road, not even Intel or
AMD.

Apple may still switch to x86. Without IBM's rescue, Apple might have
already started. The Mac market isn't large enough to support processor
development, and Apple killed off any other market for desktop PPC.

It no longer matters, as all the things that made Macs worth using have
been destroyed by the NeXTies, at the same time that MS has made Windows
much better and nicer. It takes a real diehard to put up with throbbing
buttons, drawers, and the *nix command line, to name a few.
__________________________________________________ __________________
TonyN.:'
'

The CPU was irrelevent. They choose an open CPU (PPC), but put it in a closed
system.

Apple has always used low cost CPUs in their entry level system. The problem
prior to the iMac was the dozens of system designs. Even after they went with
open interfaces and just four systems, they still cost more than comparable
PCs.

If Apple releases OSX for industry standard PCs, they will lose most of their
hardware revenues. They may make it up if the can sell OSX for the price of
Win 2k/XP Pro. They could get 10% market share this way.

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in
message le.rogers.com...
| Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
| Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
| against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count on
| the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:
|
|
| http://makeashorterlink.com/?P5CC21826
|

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in
message
. cable.rogers.com...
"Beemer Biker" wrote in message
...
"Yousuf Khan" wrote in
message
le.rogers.com...
Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't
count
on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:

Interesting, maybe another 10 years from now another ex-CEO will say "we
should have made it an open system in the late 90's.

One can only wonder. In the late 80's, Intel was just introducing their
first 32-bit processor, the 80386. But that was still just a scalar,
one-instruction per cycle (at best) processor with no cache. At that time,
the Mhz speed king was the Alpha, and most people rightly assumed that it
would be the first to reach the 1Ghz speed rating. Little did they know
that
an x86 cloner, AMD, would be the first to 1Ghz; and that the whole x86
market segment would be quickly undergoing revolutionary evolutions (now
is
that an ironic phrase, "revolutionary evolution"). Within one generation
of
the 386, they had the processors with FPU and caches onboard (486). Within
two generations, they had superscalar processors (Pentium). All the while,
all of this upgrade technology was being financed by the incredible volume
of the previous generations.


Almost forgot that the AMD processor usurped the Pentium by a couple of days
with an announced product that didn't even ship for weeks later. That's
history for you. I'm not sure moving to the Intel platform would have made
them a more profitable company. If Sun moved all of it's hardware to
PC/AMD64, would it make more money?

lost writes:

Apple would've done well to go into partnership with Acorn over the ARM CPU
platform, but I doubt Acorn would've liked that very much. Acorn were like that.


Why would that have been preferable to the PPC platform?
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
Southwestern NM Regional Science and Engr Fair: http://www.nmsu.edu/~scifair