[corty]

Yes, but Sparc was on life-support as soon as Oracle bought Sun, and dead soon after. Sparc was already hideously expensive and slow compared to x86 during the Sun days. There innovation in Sparc came to a halt soon after T1, which also dropped most of the really nice features like CPU and RAM hotswapping. So you just got something expensive, slow and incompatible for five to six times the price. Oracle then proceeded to cut research further, cut rebates, cut off customers from support trying to renegotiate higher rates. Which sent everyone running to x86 if they weren't already.

Solaris on Sparc was great until ca. 2006. After that it started dying.

[reg_windows]

This is so very far from the truth. The 2000's were a poor decade for Sun's management of SPARC. They wasted hundreds of millions on the Rock chip which is a story waiting to be written someday (Marc Tremblay, the Rock architect, was being portrayed with god-like praise by Sun executives, always citing the mountains of patents he had but as we know, patents aren't a leading indicator of technical or business success). Then they foolishly latched the SPARC program to a Stanford professor's idea of Chip Multi Threading which had some good ideas but was not performant at the very time when X64 clock rates were rocketing, due to Intel and AMD's fab processes. I'm not an Oracle apologist by any means but Oracle revived SPARC R&D and made the chip competitive again. Larry even funded a lower cost S7 SPARC chip intended for high volume cloud deployments. And as has been mentioned, Oracle also supported (again, with millions of dollars) the SPARC software-in-silicon program, which provided hardware support for encryption, bad pointer detection, and tabular memory compression/searching (DAX). They tried but it was too late for SPARC. But it should never be said that Oracle didn't pump a lot money into SPARC after the Sun aquisition.

[binarycrusader]

The notes about SPARC hardware performance are not accurate; there were significant performance improvements to SPARC in progress before the Oracle acquisition and some after. Oracle made significant investments for a time after the acquisition. I don't know at what point that direction changed, but it must have been somewhere between 2014-2017.

For anyone that got to use a T3, T4+, etc. performance was obviously and substantially improved.

You're also ignoring significant innovations such as ADI.

Regardless, it doesn't matter anymore.

[pjmlp]

The SPARC innovations for hardware memory tagging, making Solaris one of the few OSes taming C in production were done after Oracle bought Sun.