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Microsoft Won't Charge More for Multicore Licenses
esimp writes "According to technewsworld:
'As servers with dual-core processors come closer to hitting the market, Microsoft announced today it will not base its per-processor software licensing charges on the number of cores in a chip, sticking to the traditional price per processor, regardless of its number of cores." Update: 10/20 00:37 GMT by T : One of the identical links to TechNewsWorld's story has now been deleted.
In a quick nutshell.
Essentially a chip with more than 1 CPU on it.
Instead of having a dual CPU with 2 fully seperate Xeons (for example), you now (in 1-2 years) will have a single Xeon that looks to the OS like 2 seperate CPUs.
The part of the CPU that contains the real logic is called the core, and the cache and interface stuff is well the non-core. So, they put the heart of 2 CPUs on a single chip and wrap 1 non-core cache & bus interconnect around it, and call it a dual-core CPU, or multi-core to be generic.
They make some changes in the bus interconnect to support this of course.
You'll see it in high end server chips at first and then it'll work its way down to the desktop. Business care about the per CPU licensing because that is usually how they pay for software.
Warning -- parent is a GNAA troll - the links take you to a GNAA crap site.
Don't click on the links above.
~m
Is today April 1?
No, it's October 19th. It's clearly marked right below the subject.
{and if the mods mark this informative i'll kill my self}
The Xeon processors will be the first Intel chips to use multicore processors, and will eventually make its way into mainstream chips.
Redhat ES vs AS server are based on CPU.
There's one difference: HT (Intel's SMT) is a way to use the processor resources more efficiently. Dual Core is like having two real CPU's (not exactly, because they share lots of stuff). The performance difference between HT and Dual Core is abysmal.
-- Who, you?
Fewer pissed-off home users who don't have to pay an extra fee to use the second 'CPU,' I would imagine.
But why is this news? Microsoft confirmed this back when Hyperthreading first came out. They were charging on the basis of sockets, not cores.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Suggested reasoning for this was that we didn't charge more when processors increased in speed by upping the clock rate, so why do it when processors increase speed by adding more cores on the die?
For subscriber preview, you have an e-mail address you can mail to if you notice any errors/mistakes that you may see in the story.
That e-mail address happens to be daddypants @ slashdot.org, hence the parent poster's comment.
...not engines, but axles.
Many toll roads charge by the axle. So if you have three (ie, you're towing a trailer or you have a big truck) they charge you more.
Uhm, you do realize that IBM, Sun, SGI, pretty much every big unix vendor will also scale OS costs per CPU? I know its fun to knock microsoft, but at least be rational about it.
With multicore, the CPUs are sharing a single memory bus. At the two-core level, this isn't too much of a performance hit, but by the time you hit four cores, you lose most of the benefit of that fourth core to the lack of memory bandwidth.
Intel's Xeon chips are running into this problem already. A single Xeon CPU has better memory performance than a single Opteron, but a four-way Opteron system, with a separate memory controller and RAM bank for each chip, blows away a four-way Xeon system, since the four Xeons have to share the memory controller and memory.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
when you buy windows, the basic version allows 2cpu
Last time I checked, Windows XP Home Edition allowed 1 socket and Pro allowed 2 sockets.
Yes.
Yes. WIndows XP counts physical processors. Windows 2000, however, counts logical processors.
Basically yes. You could split your high-load terminal services over two single-core single-cpu servers (pay more licences) or use just a single server with dual-core chips (effectively two cpu's).
Domino (ie the lotus notes server) licence this way. It means I have to disable the hyperthreading at a bios level on my servers or pay two server licences as a single physical processor counts as two logical processors. This really blows as our standard servers come like this and you don't want to pay two licences for a small office/small server.
It makes licencing more difficult and gives them more cash without providing any more value in their software.
Just another reason why I want to dump notes/domino as a corporate product.