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by gt0 105 days ago
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.
2 comments
twoodfin 105 days ago
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.
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gt0 105 days ago
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.
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twoodfin 105 days ago
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.

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icedchai 105 days ago
Sparc stopped being competitive in the early 2000’s.
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