Yes, I had the same experience while using various Sun computers between 1995 and 2005. During all that decade the Sun computers were reliable, but excessively slow.

Around the beginning of 2006, I had a laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU and I could run on it Cadence and Mentor tools for ASIC design and the simulations were much faster than on a big Sun multi-processor server. Later that year our team finally got some servers with AMD Opteron, which accelerated dramatically the work in comparison with the traditional Sun servers.