Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Sun push the thread envelope
According to The Register the next iteration of Sun's Niagara chip will have 16-cores and 16 threads per core . Apart from the mind-boggling number of threads which will become available in an eight socket 1U rack, the licensing implications are a bit of a facer for Oracle. Soon a server with a single chip in it could incur a sixteen CPU license. At least at the moment if customers don't want to pay Oracle's multi-core fees they have the option to tear out some chips. But that's not an option with Niagara 3. Can Oracle seriously maintain a policy of selling licenses in bundles of sixteen?
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4 comments:
hmmmm, Microslop charges one licence amount per chip, be it 1, 2, 4, 8 or indeed 16 cpus in it.
I wonder how much longer it's gonna last: one of them, Oracle or Microsoft, will have to give...
Oracle also has a per socket licensing model for Standard Edition. So this niagara may be elligible for a SE?
Hmm...
There is a point on the price curve where it makes sense to rewrite all your software and retrain all your DBAs to work with a cheaper DB.
The official term is "FYO point": http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/date/20040828#the_economics_of_software
I wonder if Oracle are not pushing it too far with the recent price increases.
In response to Laurent's comment, the 'per socket' definition for SE has apparently changed recently, as reported here:
http://www.pythian.com/blogs/1009/recent-changes-to-oracle-se-licensing-rules-higher-price
It's more of a 'per chip' than 'per socket' or 'per processor' or 'per core'. It is too confusing for me.
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