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.

Comments

Re:Stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Microsoft did the same with Hyperthreading

[Zeever]

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.