There's a story that the Sun486i, which went as far as a small pre-production batch, was vetoed by the internal SPARC types in part because it was faster than w

There's a story that the Sun486i, which went as far as a small pre-production batch, was vetoed by the internal SPARC types in part because it was faster than what they were delivering at the time, so the company didn't followup on the wildly popular Sun386i.... On the other hand, you're comparing a 1991 or earlier SPARC chip with the late 1992 486/66. Weitek offered their own after market clock doubled SPARC POWER µP, although I'm not sure it gained as much as the clock doubled 486. The Solaris story on x86 was poor, indeed: in 1999 I set up a x86 machine with a removable hard drive so it could run the various operating systems our customers used, Solaris was the only OS we couldn't get running on it (and I first bare metaled a UNIX(TM) system in 1981 (sic) so I don't it was our fault). One or two BSDs including the commercial one, Linux, forget what else, but not Solaris. Then again, as I note plenty of people were willing to run another OS on Sun x86 hardware, but couldn't buy it. And echoing your other Java comments, a 2001 project I was involved in, running on SPARC hardware, dropped the idea of using Java because the SPARC implimentation at the time was too buggy. As for their closing down their free C complier, I myself never found it difficult to get GCC running on a SPARC machine through the '90s. But, yeah, that added a barrier.