I think this sorta forgets how slow the cpus were - I was running mostly ASIC design workloads on big Sun hardware in 2001 and we eventually got some x86 boxes that were only 32 bit but could run some of our jobs - and the single-threaded perf of these commodity machines was amazing compared to the Sparc boxes. When x86-64 came around, this was the death of all the Sun hardware in that group.
Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.
Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.
Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.
Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.