IDC's conclusion: "Oracle has invested deeply in improving`the performance of the T-series processors it developed following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010. It has pushed its engineering efforts to release new SPARC processor technology — providing a much more competitive general-purpose server platform. This will provide an immediate improvement for its large installed base, even as it lends momentum to a new round of competition in the Unix server marketplace."
IDC also noted the "dramatic performance gains for SPARC, with 16-core microprocessor technology based on three years of IP (intellectual property) development at Oracle, following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. in January, 2010."
The new T5 servers use SPARC T5 processor chips that offer more than double the performance of SPARC T4 chips, which were released just over a year ago. And the T4 chips, in turn, were a significant departure from all previous SPARC CMT CPUs, in that the T4 chips offered excellent performance for single-threaded workloads.
The new M5 servers use up to 32 SPARC M5 processors, each using the same "S3" SPARC cores as the T5 chips.