> Wrong on the demise of the Sparc. Oracle just posted a massively > record breaking TPC-C benchmark using their new Sparc T3 servers, > something like 30 MILLION TPM. Oracle has very publically committed to keeping SPARC strong, which is good news for those of us believe in diversity in the compute-verse. Even so, SPARC is also supported by Fujitsu, so as they... "[SPARC's] demise has been greatly exaggerated." > > There's also Power aka PPC, formerly used in Apple Macintosh computers, > and still used on large scale IBM AIX Unix servers, the Power series. > These also are very high performance. Just a minor nit here, POWER is not the same thing as PPC. PPC branched from POWER with strong influences from other vendors and technologies. PPC has since evolved into a mostly embedded platform, though later POWER releases are (mostly) compatible with PPC. One of my former employers (a fossilized System V UNIX vendor) was part of the alliance that worked on a common UNIX implementation for this processor family, which sadly, never came to fruition.