tool for analysing an application's level of parallelism and use of floating point instructions to determine if it is suitable for use on a T1 or T2 platform. In addition to web and application tier processing, the UltraSPARC T1 may be well suited for smaller database applications which have a large user count. One customer has published results showing that a MySQL application running on an UltraSPARC T1 server ran 13.5 times faster than on an AMD Opteron server. Virtualization T1 is the first SPARC processor that supports the Hyper-Privileged execution mode. The SPARC Hypervisor runs in this mode, and it can partition a T1 system into 32 Logical Domains, each of which can run an operating system instance. Currently, Solaris, Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD are supported. Software licensing issues Traditionally, commercial software suites such as Oracle Database charge their customers based on the number of processors the software runs on. In early 2006, Oracle changed the licensing model by introducing the processor factor. With a processor factor of .25 for the T1, an 8-core T2000 requires only a 2-CPU license. The "Oracle Processor Core Factor Table" has since been updated regularly as new CPUs came to market. In Q3 2006, IBM introduced the concept of Value Unit (VU) pricing. Each core of the T1 is 30 PVUs (each T2 core is 50 PVUs, and T3 is 70 PVUs) instead of the default value of 100 PVUs per core. Weaknesses The T1 only offered a single Floating Point unit to be shared by the 8 cores, limiting usage in HPC environments. This weakness was mitigated with the follow-on UltraSPARC T2 processor, which included 8 floating point units, as well as other additional features. Furthermore the T1 was only available in uniprocessor systems, limiting vertical scalability in large enterprise environments. This weakness was mitigated with the follow-on "UltraSPARC T2 Plus", as well as the next generation SPARC T3 and SPARC T4. The UltraSPARC T2+, SPARC T3, and SPARC T4 all offer single, dual, and quad socket configurations. The T1 had outstanding throughput with massive numbers of threads supported by the processor, but older applications burdened with single thread bottlenecks occasionally exhibited poor overall performance. Single-threaded application weakness was mitigated with the follow-on SPARC T4 processor. The T4 core count was reduced to 8 (from 16 on the T3), the cores were made more complex, the clock rate was nearly doubled —