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.
replyPerhaps 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.
replySure, my work got a few of the Niagaras too and they were tremendous build machines for Solaris software.
replyBut if you’re judging an ISA by performance scalability, you generally want to look at single-threaded performance.