DEC indulged an enormous number of also-rans. It is from the perspective of 2025 that we remember some of the good stuff and forget all the bizarre mis-fires.

Off the top of my head:

* Two duplicate "high-end" VAX architectures (VAX 8000 vs VAX 9000), because no one wanted to choose between CMOS and ECL

* Three duplicate systems targeted at the high-end (Alpha, VAX 9000, VAX 8000)

* Two duplicate RISC+UNIX systems, because DEC was extremely late to market (MIPS 3000/5000 series vs Alpha)

* Two duplicate UNIX software packages, because DEC was really late to market (1970s ULTRIX ported to MIPS, OSF/1 on Alpha, and the never-fucking-released OSF/1 on MIPS because DEC just could not get their shit together)

* Four duplicate low end systems (MIPS, PDP-11, NVAX, Alpha were all sold simultaneously at the same price point!)

* A dozen utterly-failed microcomputer projects (Pro/3xx, Rainbow, etc)

DEC was not a particularly well-managed company. Their approach, for decades, was "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks." This worked fine right up until it didn't work at all.

It is also worth noting that Alpha, the "good" DEC initiative, was a failure. It lost a lot of money! market share never got out of the single digits.

> Then how do you explain StrongARM?

Do I need to? StrongARM is pretty much the definition of an "also-ran" product, no? It had no particularly notable design wins, and while it sold in reasonable volume was a distant second to MIPS in the "consumer junk" segment[1]. DEC unloaded it to Intel, where it becamse Xscale, and Intel dumped it on Marvell. At no point did anyone really care much about it.

Even within the ARM world itself, it was ARM Ltd's CPU cores (also Qualcomm had some decent designs) that powered the architecture's way back to relevance on phones, out of which Apple would grow to dominate.

[1] Set top boxes, cable modems, stuff like that.

That's a little unfair. StrongARM did well in the WinCE market (which I assume you are referring to as 'consumer junk') and did very well in the embedded market especially as Xscale over several generations (PXA, IOP, etc). As an embedded chip with a relatively short lifespan that's reasonably impressive.

However, the idea that somehow it (or any of it's contemporary ARM kin) could somehow 'replace SPARC and save Sun Microsystems'...well, that's just laugh out loud silly.

1996 was far too early for what they were trying to make it for:

> The StrongARM was designed to address the upper end of the low-power embedded market, where users needed more performance than the ARM could deliver while being able to accept more external support. Targets were devices such as newer personal digital assistants and set-top boxes.

They'd be able to power a faster PalmPilot or proto-TiVo with it but this was years before the mobile design advances, let alone battery and screen improvements, that led to the iPhone.

What should we 'explain' about a false equivalence? Different processors for different markets? It was never much other than a mobile and embedded processor. Yeah, I suppose some folks thought is could be workstation PC, but how many RiscPC 700s were sold? By 1996, Sun had SPARC for, what, 10 years, and had just introduced UltraSPARC? StrongARM was never in the same performance ballpark on any dimension other than performance/watt.

I thought all the uncritical ARM fanbois had defected to RISC-V. Good to see some still carrying the torch.

What is clear to everyone is that ARM survived and SPARC did not.

Sun ownership would not have guaranteed survival, as management did many foolish things, but it would have upped the odds.

First sentence of the history: they couldn't make alpha do it.