Some anecdata:

Somebody tried to use a university department's T2 because it was unused and reasonably parallel for some experiment on hashing.

Single core SHA1 speed on a t2 was ~300KB/s or so. Even with its 32 threads I recommended going for any ancient desktop that happened not to be used for a couple of days because the experiment would finish much faster there. Those desktops were about Core Duo class and managed 50-100MB/s SHA1 throughput (I think, it's been a couple of years).

What the hell...??? Ok, it's looking like Im going to retract that recommendation for workstations. Maybe still servers thst are I/O bound.

As a 2011 MBA user, I totally understand sticking with old tech that works. T1/T2 isn't really apples-to-apples, though. I came across this random quote from the libgmp devs that made me laugh:

"SPARC chips before T4 under-perform on GMP. This is not because the GMP code is inadequately optimised for SPARC, but due to the basic v9 ISA as well as the micro-architecture of these chips. The T1 and T2 chips perform worse than any other SPARC chips; they compare to a 15 year older 486 chip."

ouch!

Ouch indeed. That's pretty bad. It's believable when I think back to the purpose of these chips: handling workloads that were more I/O and concurrency bound than CPU bound. So, probably identify and eliminate these problems early on even if developer has to drop some threads or cores.

Note: There's always my other recommendation of turning open-source Leon3 into a multicore. Im curious what it or Leon4 get on such a benchmark versus Intels on similar process nodes.