Recently I've been looking into some SPARC devices and their capabilities.
But when I look for the differences between the two, I've seen a lot of people using the 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.
Best Answer
Some would argue the metaphor stillholds true, others would argue otherwise.
There's clock speed, but you also need to factor in RISC vs CISC.
What people get, or hope to get with SPARC, is a more stable platform with less downtime. Tecoms were historic SPARC consumers due to nebs compliance.
As noted in comments above, it scales better, so you'll tend to see larger systems. Along with possibly products that require more resources. ie: A database in memory. Some of the newer SPARC CPUs are also much more power efficient -- power and cooling is a big deal in datacenters.
Someone noted "software in silicon", in the comments. Oracle expanded on Sun putting crypto units in the CPUs, by adding database instructions, and plans on adding features.
In the end, the architect(s) will determine what is needed for the system. Chances are it will be a mix of solutions that best meet the requirements.
On the CPU cost. AMD has kept Intel in check over the years. Oracle appears to be trying to be cost competitive to x86, as well as it's RISC competitors.