x86 small workloads
"...If you were choosing a CPU platform, would you choose:
d) SPARC. It has ummmmmm
The years of x86 vs SPARC/Itanium/POWER are over..."
It is true that x86 works fine today. If you have smallish workloads. An Intel Xeon E7v3 can cope with some nice workloads. Small that is. If you need to tackle the largest workloads, there are no other choice than using Unix such as POWER or SPARC.
The largest x86 business server for Enterprise has until recently been 8-sockets. Just recently there was a 16-socket x86 server released. 16-socket x86 servers are immature and scale badly. And guess what? 64-socket SPARC server beats 8/16-socket x86 servers.
For instance, the best SAP score is 320.000 saps for x86 with the brand new Xeon E7v3. The top record? It's SPARC with 844.000 saps, it's SPARC all the way. There is no way an x86 can come much higher than 300.000 saps. SGI UV2000 with 10.000s of cores can not do it, as it is a cluster. And scale-out clusters can not run business software. You need a scale-up server with as many as 32-sockets or 64-sockets. Decades ago there was an 144-socket SPARC server.
So, yes, if you only have smallish workloads, x86 is fine and you dont need Unix. If you have extreme demands, only Unix will do. The biggest POWER8 server, the E880, has only 16-sockets and 16TB RAM, so maybe it will be considered midsize. The largest SPARC servers have 64-sockets and 32TB (and soon 64TB), and are from Fujitsu, the mighty M10-4S. So the only high end business servers with >32-sockets out there, are SPARC. POWER8 maxes out at 16-sockets. Intel Xeon maxes out at 16-sockets as well (but the new 16-socket x86 likely has awfully bad performance as neither Windows nor Linux has ever scaled this high earlier).