I don't think anybody suggests Oracle couldn't make faster SPARC processors, it's just that development of SPARC ended almost 10 years ago. At the time SPARC was abandoned, it was very competitive.
I don't think anybody suggests Oracle couldn't make faster SPARC processors, it's just that development of SPARC ended almost 10 years ago. At the time SPARC was abandoned, it was very competitive.
In single-threaded performance? That’s not how I remember it: Sun was pushing parallel throughput over everything else, with designs like the T-Series & Rock.
Perhaps not single thread, but Rock was a dead end a while before Oracle pulled the plug, and Sun/Oracle's core market of course was always servers not workstations. We used Niagara machines at my work around the T2 era, a long time ago, but they were very competitive if you could saturate the cores and had the RAM to back it up.
Sure, my work got a few of the Niagaras too and they were tremendous build machines for Solaris software.
But if you’re judging an ISA by performance scalability, you generally want to look at single-threaded performance.
Sparc stopped being competitive in the early 2000’s.