Comment by adrian_b
9 hours ago
Yes, I had the same experience while using various Sun computers between 1995 and 2005. During all that decade the Sun computers were reliable, but excessively slow.
Around the beginning of 2006, I had a laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU and I could run on it Cadence and Mentor tools for ASIC design and the simulations were much faster than on a big Sun multi-processor server. Later that year our team finally got some servers with AMD Opteron, which accelerated dramatically the work in comparison with the traditional Sun servers.
Both SPARC and PowerPC met the same fate. A brilliant ISA done poorly was no match for a poor ISA (x86) done really well.
I had the same experience twice in a few months from those two. Moving from a Sparc server to a Xeon based system, and again when the first Intel Mac Mini's came out and was faster than the dual-G5 systems we had.