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.

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twoodfin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	twoodfin 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sparc stopped being competitive in the early 2000’s.