Notes

They are both CPU types. Intel mainly make what are known as x86 processors which have

a particular instruction set and conform to whats known as a CISC ( Complex Instruction

Set ) type - These are also made by AMD. This means most instructions are implemented

in silicon. The SPARC architecture is a RISC ( Reduced Instruction Set ) type where

they implement a lower number of instructions in silicon which makes each instrucion

faster and then other instruction are made from combinations of the hardware based

ones.
Another major difference is the byte ordering in that the bits are Big Endian in SPARC

and little endian in Intel / x86 i.e. BE reads bytes left to right, LE is right to left






Sparc processors are normally more powerfull because the
hardware architecture is different.

The software that runs on these processors (the operating
system) can be developped to give the same behaviour to the
user and the applications e.g. NMS/EMS systems.
NMS/EMS software is in general written in a high level
programming language and the compiler will translate this
language into the code that runs on a particular operating
system.

So: the difference is mainly hardware and performance



Ferrari vs bus metaphor

If your goal is to get 2 people from point A to point B as quickly as possible, then choose Intel. If your goal is to get 100 people from point A to point B as quickly as possible, choose SPARC.

Although a lot of benchmarks these days show that x86 outperforms SPARC in most of the cases, quite a lot of people(whom I saw on the internet) who use SPARC still believes that this is true and benchmarks do not reflect reality.

And Oracle still produces newer SPARC processors: T4, T5 and sells them for a huge amount of money compared to typical x86 servers. I wonder what kind of benefit people can get from using SPARC over x86 in 2015 and whether the metaphor is still correct.