Given the vastly different design philosophies of these two architectures, why is a comparison of a "16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel" inherently rigged? Aren'

Given the vastly different design philosophies of these two architectures, why is a comparison of a "16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel" inherently rigged? Aren't those SPARC cores a lot smaller than x86_64 cores? I mean, the first SPARC CPU was implemented on 2 20,000 gate Fujitsu gate-arrays (2nd was the floating point unit)....