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Should Dual Cores Require Dual Licenses?
sebFlyte writes "The multi-core debate continues. HP and Intel have laid into Oracle and (to a lesser extent) BEA over their their treatment of multi-core processers. Oracle's argument that 'a core is a CPU and therefore you should pay us all your money' isn't a popular one, it would seem. What does Oracle's stubbornness imply for the industry as a whole, with multicore chips coming to the fore so strongly?"
Oracle's stubborness says, time to start looking at DB2.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
So people will move to competition if the competition is more cost effective for them.
I'm kinda torn on this one...
on one hand, a person with a dual core chip is likely to get slightly better performance than 2 actual chips.
on the other, if everything goes to dual core, then we've just handed Oracle, MS, et al. double (or more?) profits on their products. Support costs will remain somewhat constant, so wtf?
I dunno... it's a hard nut to crack
Dual core chips are sold in the "CPU" section of stores I'm going to consider them singular.
Central Processing Unit.
Theres no 's' on the end.
HP and Intel should manage their own business, and leave Oracle to mismanage theirs.
What have we come to that companies write open letters to themselves, using public opinion to try to damage competitors or enhance their own position... and the public eats it up and supports it?
Intel, this is your problem. Deal with it without whining to the public... or you'll look like whiners. It isn't like the wining is going to actually help your case anyway.
Microsoft of all people did the right thing.. why can't Oracle?
> What does Oracle's stubbornness imply for the
> industry as a whole, with multicore chips coming
> to the fore so strongly?"
PostgreSQL is coming along nicely...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Vendors charge what the market will bear. Buyers pay the least they can for value. Charging per-processor, or any other basis, is just a way to negotiate prices without saying "how much have you got?", which would make the buyer more resistant. It's arbitrary, except as a way of measuring buyer's willingness to pay. Trying to derive finer-grained sense from per-processor licenses to per-core licenses is treating the price model with more respect than it deserves, so no wonder it breaks down quickly.
--
make install -not war
I've always found Oracle's licensing to be pretty wrong-headed at every turn. You can sense that they really don't feel they need to compete on price, which is usually the ultimate undoing of an overly arrogant company.
My sense of things, though, is that to move from one database technology to another is a massive undertaking. You fight with these tools so much that you become an expert with them... warts and all... and even if someone else has a better and cheaper mouse-trap, mission-critical stuff just refuses to budge off the old workhorse.
The dual-core problem is just a new flavor of the Oracle licensing problem. It will be interesting to see if they budge.
David Whatley
Ever hear of SPARC?
Essentially open source. Go join the consortium, and start building your own processor. Of course, you need your own Fab plant, engineers, material supply chains, circuit designers...
Oh, what do you know? Open source doesn't fix everything after all!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Unless Oracle matches this policy, they run the risk of losing sales to Microsoft's SQLServer product.
I'm not usually an MS fanboy, but I'm rooting for them this time.
Wait until Cell processors become the norm... when you have a process that runs around your network looking for resources to run on.... Oracle's sales reps are going to have a field day with that one!
Due to greed and stagnancy, Oracle has maybe 5 years left before the "smell of rot" is all pervasive. When MySQL and PostgreSQL become so common place (think Apache on the net today vs. Netscape's web server from the mid to late '90s), Oracle will be lucky to be a million dollar company.
If you doubt my words, think of what MySQL and PostgreSQL were just a year ago. Then think "What will they be like with 5 more YEARS of development?". Then realize that they are free to everyone and you'll see why Oracle is doomed.
Of course, Microsoft will claim it as their victory, but you, me and everyone else not running SQL Server will know better.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Don't patronize companies with licensing/pricing that you don't like.
Specifically, there are a number of alternatives for Oracle, both freeware and commercial. I haven't spec'ed Oracle for a client deployment in years thanks to DB2/Sybase/Postgresql.
Cheers,
Even upgrading to the latest version is a nightmare.
thus, logic states that it's no harder to switch than to upgrade...
"If the world worked like that, we'd all be running Linux and GPL software."
Not really. Even now many tasks have no GPL solution. 3D cad is a big one.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So people will move to competition if the competition is more cost effective for them.
Exactly (potentially)...
The original question was, "Should Dual Cores Require Dual Licenses?"
There is no should or shouldn't.
A contract is an agreement between two parties.
One sets forward their terms. The other agrees, steps away, or offers ammended terms for consideration. A license is essentially just a representation of that.
"Should" a dual core require dual licenses? There is no should. Oracle are allowed to consider it essential to them and for them to walk away if they don't get their way - and potential users are allowed to consider it too high a cost and walk away if they don't get their way too. Or they can come to an agreement.
Inevitably, one of three things happen:
Customers walk away, Oracle reconsiders its stance.
Customers suck it up, deciding it's still worth it, if less so. Oracle continues.
Oracle loses overall share but profits per customer are higher, thus they're willing to continue with fewer, more valuable customers.
From Oracle's perspective, why should customers halve their license fees by simply upgrading to dual cores? What happens in a few years when Intel has 8 core CPUs? Do they only get 1/8th revenues? As Oracle sees it, they're right.
From the customer's perspective, all they did was upgrade their hardware with a single piece. As they see it, they're right.
In the end, there's not really the notion of right or wrong. Just two different views. Ultimately, equilibrium will likely settle it somewhere in the middle.
Let them charge whatever they want. The massive companies with money to burn will still burn it.
The rest of us that would never shelled out for oracle anyways will keep on using postgresql, to our advantage.
This goes beyond simple enterprise databases. Look at spatial databases. In Canada, it costs roughly $50,000 plus $13,000 per year in maintenance fees for an ArcSDE / Oracle based spatial database license.
Or, it costs nothing but your time if you choose to make an equally powerful, easier to use spatial database using PostGIS.
So, you can buy your spatial database, or you can have a database plus (at least in the purchase year) pay for a dedicated person to play with it for you.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
If the Powers That Be insist upon Oracle databases, that's their call; all they have to do is fork out whatever Oracle is demanding (whether it be per CPU, per core, per RAM chip, firstborn son, etc.) If the price Oracle demands is too high, they'll start looking at alternatives: DB2, PostgreSQL, SQL Server being the main ones that spring to mind.
Oracle needs to be careful that they don't price themselves out of the market. Because the simple fact of the matter is, there comes a point where people are simply unwilling to pay the price demanded, and at that point, you'll see a massive exodus to the competition. For some, that price is higher than others. Only the marketplace will determine what is, and is not, reasonable; and that's ultimately the way it should be.
Who cares what Oracle and M$ say about it? Just use Free Software and you can use as many cores as you want! End of discussion.
My other car is first.
"But the processor on a graphics card is a GPU, not a CPU. Hence, GPU (and for that matter co-processor) count does not apply. quod erat demonstrandum"
...
lets dissect that...
CPU= central processing unit
GPU= graphics processing unit
Say, if i have dual athlon mobo, how can both the processors be central processing units in the system ? Clearly, one is but a co-processor, and thus i shouldnt pay for extra licences ?
A system can, by the very definition of the term, only have one central processing unit, all the DSPs, cores and controllers are but co-processing units.
Or does it come down to processing unit being turing-complete or not ? Well, newer graphics cores already are turing-complete
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Who cares what Oracle and M$ say about it? Just use Free Software and you can use as many cores as you want! End of discussion.
Is this karma-whoring or is it a genuine knee-jerk response of the type that gives open-source supporters a bad name?
You know, there might be good reasons for people to prefer Oracle to open source solutions, in spite of its inherent disadvantages. Perhaps it would be better to acknowledge them, and/or provide a persuasive argument in favor of your preferred open-source solution.
But I'll tell you now; open source may have numerous advantages, but Oracle is still way more powerful than current open-source offerings.
That may change, but perhaps you should direct your efforts into improving them, rather than spouting black-and-white zealotry.
Central is in terms of where the work gets done. Instructions are decoded, executed, and memory / peripherals manipulated. Classically, the CPU does all the work and management. To increase speed, aspects such as moving data between peripherals and memory (DMA) have been pushed off of the CPU. In early days math co-processors were seperate (handled FP operations), but even this work could be emulated in software. That does not mean the CPU is not the central processing unit due to these enhancements.
When discussing dual processor systems, the style used is not a Master/Slave relationship. One CPU does not control the other. Instead they are both capable of managing all resources. They are given IDs (e.g. 0, 1) and the operating decides which processor executes what. In high-end systems, the OS is tolerant to CPUs dying or being switched in/out on the fly.
Oracle is justified in calling a dual-core CPU equivelant to a dual SMP system. Two identical CPUs are put on silicon, with each having its own interface to memory. Architecturally, these dual-core CPUs are identical to a single-core. The only difference is that some designs allow shared cache (e.g. Power4), but Intel/AMDs don't. The performance of a dual-core or dual processor system is identical when you factor out minor design choices.
That's like saying a hard drive with four platters is really four hard drives, not just one.
I'm not surprised in the least that an organization whose sole purpose is to generate profits, is looking at a creative (if rediculous), means to improve their bottom line. That is their job. In fact it's job one, and any CEO that forget's that will soon be looking for work.
That said, it is the purpose of people, the citizenry, the public, you and me, to make certain that when a company attempts to make a profit by paving your and/or anybody elses' ass over, we step up and say 'NO". We do this through legal channels, we do this through regulatory bodies, and we do this with our pocket books.
In the not too distant future, a machine at the center of your home, or your weareble technology, will have a reconfigurable processor perfectly capable of spinning up dozens or even hundreds of cores. One or more may be running proprietary software that some company can claim they should be getting paid for. The point is, that only one customer, is receiving value from their singular operation of a product they purchased for their own personal use.
I'm terribly sad this makes it more complicated for HP and Oracle to charge time against service, but to suggest that they should be getting paid by the core is rediculous... as a response, I'd suggest that if they want to charge by the core, that as users we resond by paying only for the process time alotted. By paying them only so many femtocents per Core cycle, they would suddenly see a significant drop in profits, and would see the err of their ways, hopefully shutting up and thanking their lucky stars that they still have a product and some semblance of a customer base (keep screwing with your patrons and see what that does to your long term profits...)
I don't blame them for money grubbing... it's not pretty, but it's kind of expected. I do blame them for shear stupidity... what makes them think people will just assume the position and take what it is they're trying to sell us... for shame...
Genda