IBM

http://www.abcg.com/TAGITT/abcgTagitt2006021407.pdf
The Sun Blade 2500/1500, HP c8000 and IBM Intellistation POWER 185, 275 and 285 are compared. The 285 comes out with a very long lead, and the high frequency POWER 185 trailing just slightly behind. The 275 is left far behind (sob, my poor 9114-275), whereas the c8000 with its dual core PA-8800 at 1GHz can't even beat the 275's single POWER4+ at 1.45GHz in multithreaded code, which is a rarity in CATIA V4. The FireGL X3 certainly does wonders against the FireGL 4/GXT6500P, although it seems that even 3-4 years after its introduction, the GXT6500P has still performance to spare and is very much CPU limited (probably on purpose so that IBM could gain major performance increases by just pouring money into the CPU, I wonder how much of the 3D pipeline is done by the CPU).

Meanwhile, the Sun machines are incredibly far behind. Why? Is the USIII really in order? If so how did they expect to compete?

IBM has been dominating silicon since the introduction of POWER1 other than a few brief slips. Remember, IBM has a sizable foundry operations and alliances that its competitors could never match. It also has research labs that have driven much of the industry.

It's a bit sad that they never did POWER6 or POWER7 workstations for us collectors to look for in a few years .

Since CATIA is more of the PLM/MCAD variety of CAD I doubt it is very demanding on the 3d GPU pipeline.

They don't call them "Big Blue" for nothing.

Yep, all UltraSPARCs are in-order superscalar, and as far as I know no SPARC has been at the top of the heap for technical computing. It was a intentional move by Sun to do in-order, as they determined that their market wouldn't benefit much from OOO.

If you want an OOO SPARC you can get a SPARC64 (Fujitsu).

Not surprised by the graphics performance, it sure validates HP's choice to move away from designing their own boards and buying from other vendors.