The T1 was unusual at the time. It did have 32 threads, but provided by 8 VERY anemic cores. It was only competitive in some very niche scenarios. A "real" 8-core SMP Sun box was still pretty much a full rack and 6 figures.
I was skeptical so I downloaded some SPECint benchmark results ( https://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html ) of T1s, Power and Xeon, compared them and thought "mh, probably a bad idea" and then I ended up having to invest quite some time to convince my management to keep using "normal" servers.
On the other hand, later, I had a bit of fun hearing stories from other colleagues telling me how slow those T1-machines were once they started running on them their normal DB-workloads => after months of everybody complaining about bad performance, everybody went back to normal servers => a lot of time & money (& nerves) spent for nothing.
Normal IT politics, I guess.
Lunch driven procurement.
In all seriousness, someone is trying to make an app to benchmark software[0]. You might be interested in that thread. Thanks for the link.
This kind of machine is nice to look at from afar but for most apps trying to get anywhere near a 64 fold speedup on your application on this would mean scrapping the code base and doing 1 failed rewrite, followed by 1 marginally successful one, taking up ruinous amounts of calendar time and engineering resources.
But of course it's diferent now than in 2005, because today we can't do any better.