I don't think there is anything surprising here.

I'm not sure exactly what subsystems your tests stress out, and this may have a
big impact, depending on your hardware:

1. You seem to be using builtin IDE controller on sparc64, which is pretty slow
2. UltraSparc-II CPUs are not the best performers compared to Pentium 3s and AMD
Athlons
3. How did you compile your software? Adding '-mcpu=ultrasparc' flag can make a
big difference
4. I think gcc has been mostly tuned for x86 hardware. On architectures like
sparc64 it does not produce very optimized code. I heard Sun compilers are much
better in this respect