News
Oracle Backs Off Slightly on Multi-Core Pricing
- By Scott Bekker
- July 27, 2005
After staking out a firm position that processor cores should be counted and
paid for as full processors under its software licensing, database and business
applications giant Oracle Corp. has backed down slightly.
According to the company's licensing page, Oracle's per-processor licensing
will now count processor cores as three-quarters of a processor. So, for example,
licensing Oracle software on a system with one processor that consists of four
cores would require the customer to pay for three processor licenses.
Exception are the Oracle Standard Edition One and Standard Edition programs
that support a maximum of one processor. In that case, even systems with multi-core
processors would cost the same as other non-multi-core, one-processor systems.
Oracle's approach is different from that taken by Microsoft, which has chosen
to license server software per processor no matter how many cores are on the
processor. IBM has also agreed to charge for dual-core systems as if they were
uni-processor servers.
Processor roadmaps for both Intel and AMD call for a large percentage of systems
to ship with multiple cores in the next few years.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.