Well, it is still 64 threads per socket, or 256 threads per box that that run parallelly. Is that not vast enough? With the 5x signlethread performance compared to the T3?

I recommend online studies.
No, not those online degree spams. But for example on www.studyastronomy.com I found that being able to choose the courses I'm really interested in (mostly cosmology/astronomy) while taking just a single course a year instead of four if I want to, puts the fun right back into studying the subject I'm interested in.
Just my 2 EUR cents.

So, how many of the companytools are webbased? How is it relevant on what OS your firefox runs on? Linux may not win the desktop war - but windows still can lose it. By fading out into a browser-running-firmware. And then why pay for windows?
The new era is the one of the cloud. Bring on the vaporware jokes.
On the serverside it is very similar. ZFS needs some more features, taking over the role of the servicerunning OS, like browsers do on the client side ;)
Sadly the OS will fade into being a firmware, not more.

Oracle is almost clueless when it comes to hardware sales and development. Try "www.sun.com"... you get a redirect to the Oracle home page and then you have to search for a link to the server product lineup. It's almost as if they are hiding the fact that they have a hardware product to sell. I don't think the Oracle brain trust knows what to do with Sun h/w and the Solaris o/s.

I beg to differ. sun.com is being redirected to oracle.com, but there right on the front page there is a complete section called 'Server and Storage Systems'.
Also, their pre-Sun HW product, the Exadata, is being updated with new Sun HW and Solaris. Solaris 11, the first major release released under the Oracle regime.

And last but not least have a look at their T-CPU roadmap - they have released the T3, and are working on the T4 to eliminate the single-thread performance weakness of the series. That is, doubling the efforts in the release cycle, in comparison to Sun's T1 and T2 releases (not to mention the Rock).

Please reconsider your views. Would Oracle have named their new product "SPARC Solaris Sunrise Supercluster" if they'd plan to invest in both Sparc and Solaris?

first of all, you can put 8 quadcore CPUs at 2.66GHz in an M5000.
You can even create two domains on the box that act like two separate machines, if you need electrical separation or want to build HA in-a-box. You can replace HW on-the-fly in the M5000. You can put more than 256GB RAM into it, if you want to. You can set up RAM mirroring in case you needed it. We are talking here real enterprise features, not just raw mips.

Anyways, we are comparing here apples to oranges, sparc to x86. If your platform decision goes towards x86, then go for it. In this case, however I would definitely consider the SF X4470 or the X4800 servers if you need raw power. Or an Exadata if you need pretuned, preconfigured RAC on X86 - there you will find the X4800s as well :)

what about the rest of the world?

you sure are a funny troll :) don't let the facts get in the way, this is slashdot.

8 CPU M3k? what are you talking about? That is a single CPU box. Yeah, quadcore, and each core can run two threads. And wtf is an UltraSparc IV 64? Nonsense detected. And "for the purpose you use them for". Exactly. You should re-think your CPU architecture if it doesn't suite your needs. rule 80/20. The plannning/ranting ratio.

You, Sir, are a troll.

instead of looking for tools you are used of on other platforms (top, killall), pls rtfm, and look for the functionalities delivered with the OS (prstat, pkill). Nonstandards switches? Which standard are you talking about?
Instead of using old USIIIi boxes, have at last a look at the Sparc64 (Mx000 series) and the CMT processor based servers (T5xx0 Series).

and so on.

The rest is just useless rant. Go check your facts, or at least read wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC64_VII , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_Enterprise and sunsolve.

Really? And what kind of hardware does Solaris run on? What kind of hardware does HPUX run on? What kind of hardware does AIX run on?

You are right with HPUX/AIX - but as for Solaris there's much more than you'd think:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/