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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:

  1. Noons25 June 2008 at 07:13:00 GMT-7

    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...

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  2. Laurent Schneider25 June 2008 at 07:16:00 GMT-7

    Oracle also has a per socket licensing model for Standard Edition. So this niagara may be elligible for a SE?

    Hmm...

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  3. Anonymous25 June 2008 at 11:21:00 GMT-7

    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.

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  4. SydOracle25 June 2008 at 16:06:00 GMT-7

    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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