It shouldn't be surprising that Niagra is slow on single threads. The whole point of the design was to support parallel, non-interactive tasks (e.g. databases)

It shouldn't be surprising that Niagra is slow on single threads. The whole point of the design was to support parallel, non-interactive tasks (e.g. databases) at the expense of non-threaded workloads. It was a design trade-off that Sun was very up front about. Even N1 & N2 gave remarkable price/performance numbers when used for the tasks it was designed for.