Comment by adrian_b

I have been using SPARC for a decade, in 1998-2007.

In all this time all the SPARC servers and workstations that we had were ridiculously slow in comparison with Intel/AMD CPUs.

Nevertheless they were used because there were a lot of EDA/CAD tools that were available only for Solaris.

As soon as Cadence, Mentor etc. have ported their programs to Linux, SPARC was dead.

Towards the end of that decade, the difference became extreme, my laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU could run a SPICE simulation much faster than a very large and very expensive multiprocessor SPARC server.

Despite their slowness, the Sun or Fujitsu computers had many nice features before they became also available on Intel/AMD computers.

For example, in 1998 I was impressed that the Sun workstation we had could be powered on and off from its keyboard, because this happened before this became normal also for Intel/AMD computers. At that time we still had PCs with PC/AT power supplies, not with ATX power supplies, so power on and off had to be done from traditional switches.