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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.
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.
> 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.
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
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
On one hand, a person with a dual core chip is likely to get slightly better performance than 2 actual chips.
...And a person with a 2GHz processor will get better performance
than a 1GHz processor (with the the same processor core, of course),
so why not charge based on clock rate?
But then, a person with a bigger L1 cache will also get better performance, so why not charge based on transistor count?
Why not just charge based on MFLOPS or MIPS? Why not charge based on actual transaction throughput?
This amounts to nothing more than a quick-and-easy way to try to sneak through a regular doubling of their pricing structure. Realistically, we can expect Moore's law to start applying to number of cores, rather than number of transistors. So, in 20 years, will Larry expect their customers to pay more than the GDP of most smaller industrialized nations? In 30 years, will he let us use Oracle if we just make him "Emperor Ellison I, monarch of Earth and the Lunar Colonies"?
No. In a few years, Oracle will simply reverse this policy, and go back to their current approach of striking the corporate rock with a big stick until it runs out of blood. That, or they will cease to exist. In the meantime... Anyone currently dependant on Oracle would do well to start migrating now, because, of the three possible outcomes (no change; no per-core pricing; going under), two mean you'll need to change eventually, and the remaining option means you'll at least get raped over the short-term.
Even upgrading to the latest version is a nightmare.
thus, logic states that it's no harder to switch than to upgrade...
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.
So if you have a dual Xeon 3.6Ghz, you're likely to get better performance than a machine with a single dual core 3.6Ghz.
This comes down to cores having to wait for access to resources, etc.
I think you are not saying what you think you are saying. In the case of Intel they should be nearly identical, since Intel shares the memory bu between two processors whether the cores are on one piece of silicon or two. AMD wil be an interesting study since a dual opteron can have memory for each processor, and each has its own connection to the peripherals. Weras all other thngs being equal a dual core Opteron would have only one memory bus for both cores and share a connection to the peripherals.
You can get equivalent performance to a dual core Sun Sparc IV 1.25Ghz with a single 1.8Ghz Fujitsu Sparc processor.
This suggests you are thinking single core higher clock vs two processors (dual core or separate). Which can often be true depending on the software.
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.