I mentioned that SPARC performance stopped being a central focus with the death of Rock, in favor of massively-multicore, low-cost designs derived from Niagara.

I mentioned that SPARC performance stopped being a central focus with the death of Rock, in favor of massively-multicore, low-cost designs derived from Niagara. You pasted an Oracle press release that focused on parallel performance. I complained, and pointed out SPECcpu as a common measurement. You responded with SPECcpu_rate, a different benchmark focused on parallel performance measurement. It is not surprising that Niagara-derivative chips do well. It is also not surprising that, core for core, they can't match modern commodity systems for density, performance, or cost. p.s. The "reliability" argument went out the window with VMware. Every fortune 500 is using x86 with VMware HA to provide the redundancy that would have once come from enterprise RISC. (Given how few RISC systems were ever configured with redundant memory or CPUs, VMware-on-commodity is probably offering a substantially better service level.) p.p.s. a basic 1U x86 server will typically have between 0.75 and 1.5 TB of RAM in it. Yes, TB, as in terabytes. Virtualization provides a market for compact, low-wattage systems with significant memory. That's just the 1Us. In 2014, "Large" x86 boxes are very large indeed. Lastly, I, too, miss Solaris/SPARC. It was a great platform that I enjoyed working with. I don't miss the associated hardware support contracts that came floating by after the Oracle buyout. It has been several years since I found a contract where SPARC or Solaris were anything but legacy platforms. It's sad, but it's not a mystery.