> On 1/17/07, Jean-Paul Calderone <exarkun@divmod.com> wrote:

> > It looks like a single core on a T1000 is much less powerful than a single
> > core in a Dell 2850, so this might account for some of the difference.

That is precisely the case.  A quote

Obviously, the UltraSparc T1 will perform quite poorly on workloads
that require single-threaded performance. For those types of
non-multithreaded workloads, Sun will rely for the time being on its
Opteron-powered Galaxy server line. In 2008, however, Sun plans to
release a new design codenamed "Rock" with better single-threaded
performance.

taken from http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051114-5569.html

You can find a bit more info here:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051116-5584.htm

This Sun hardware is built /specifically/ for running /highly/
multithreaded code, it has always sucked royally at single-threaded
performance, this was very much a design decision.