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?"

Comments

Wait... I thought it was $/user?!?

[ka9dgx]

The ad on the back of the trade magazine I read said $149/user. Do I get a clone of myself when I use a dual processor machine?

Let them be stupid...the market will correct them.

--Mike--

That's mainframe thinking...

[Dinosaur Neil]

This is sort of scam is used on pricing for mainframes all the time. One place where I worked used this as an excuse to (finally!) dump some crappy and archaic Computer Associates products when they started charging us double for a dual processor, even though one processor was partitioned to another OS that didn't run any of their products.

Portable code solves this problem

[Decaff]

Oracle's stubborness says, time to start looking at DB2.

Absolutely. But how many can easily switch?

For a long time I have had (occasionally heated) arguments with SQL addicts who insist that almost everything about an application should be coded in SQL and stored procedures. Meanwhile I have been moving all my logic away from the database engine, using APIs such as Java Data Objects, which makes my code very rapidly portable between databases. Now I am in a position to switch my code (and data) easily between different database vendors if there is a licensing or price issue.

I strongly believe we should start to think of databases simply as engines for storing and retrieving inter-related objects and not as platforms for writing applications.

Re:Portable code solves this problem

[Decaff]

Whereas for my part I am absolutely sick of dealing with software that does not perform well on ANY platform and cannot be moved rapidly to a new technology.

Me too. That is why I use Java+JDO, and not DB-specific SQL.

Too bad they don't support the neato language where we put the business logic.

Good point. Show me a platform that does not support Java. I would rather have the logic there than in some neato DB language that has to be ported, at great expense.

whereas if the business logic had been stored in the database, reimplemention would be a few weeks work.

A few weeks work? Have you actually worked on such a re-implementation? This is nonsense. A moderate project can take months, and a large scale project years, especially on a live system. I know this from personal experience.

and the result will be 2 systems each faster, more scalable, and more secure than your portable system.

This is simply a statement with no foundation.

There are no security, scalability or speed issues with the system I use - JDO. It is designed to be secure and scalable, to work at high performance on clustered systems and to generate optimal SQL for each version of major databases. Large corporations use it for this purpose.

Which doesn't even touch on the topic of data integrity...

Why should the matter of data integrity be relevant? Systems like JDO and Hibernate and Toplink fully support all aspects of transactions, clustering and cache management. Data integrity is, of course, not an issue. If it were, these products would not be so widely and successfully used in critical projects.

Re:Kinda torn

[Builder]

Exqueeze me please?

Everything I've read so far says that two separate chips will give better performance than a dual core at the same clock speeds.

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.

This is why I don't like the dual core == dual licence scheme. I'm _NOT_ getting twice the performance as with a single chip, but I have to pay twice.

In fact, this is something that makes Fujitsu servers attractive as competition for Sun. You can get equivalent performance to a dual core Sun Sparc IV 1.25Ghz with a single 1.8Ghz Fujitsu Sparc processor. Those clock speeds might be slightly out, but find the nearest :) So not only are you getting the processor cheaper, you're HALVING your licence costs.

Remember, it's not just a few players in the enterprise market that licence like this. Veritas, Oracle, HP Openview, Websphere MQ, they all do this. So if you can get the same performance from a single core CPU as you can from a dual core, halving your licence costs can be a big deal!

Makes more sense than per chip or per core

[frovingslosh]

Although there are still issues about what makes a machine when there is a very tightly coupled network, this actually makes the most sense. After all, the major flaw in the per CPU (chip) but not per core argument is that it allows some companies (Intel, for example) to put multiple processors into a machine that only needs one license, but prevents another company (Asus, for example) to build a motherboard (machine) that takes multiple processors by acomplish the exact same end. By what logic should an Intel motherboard running one Intel chip but containing four complete core processors pay a lower licensing fee that an Asus motherboiard with (for example) two AMD cores, each one on it's own chip, for a total of only two cores?

And it can hardly be argued that it's an issue of chip count, what if I were to take a dozen or more chips (PLAs, slice processors, and other exotic devices) and from these build up a single 386 class CPU? Clearly such a device would only require one license to run software, even though it was made of multiple chips. And since there are already court rulings that instruction sets can not be copyrighted, it is clearly my right to build such a device and software vendors would have no valid reason to keep me from legally buying copies of their software and running it on my creation.

One should also consider that my "single core" desktop computer actually contains at least two significant processors, the CPU and the graphics card (which may very well have more processing power than the CPU). While software like Oracle doesn't take advantage of the processing power of the graphics processor today, if some sophisticated user were to enhance his OS such that some improvements were made that could take some small advantage of the processing power of the graphics card, would this somehow change the processor count as far as Oracle was concerned?

If a 386 computer with a 387 co-processor counts as only one CPU, shouldn't I be able to designate one of two Athlon processors on my dual CPU motherboard as a "co-processor" and pay for only one machine? Sure, each of the Athlon processors is far more powerful that the 396 and 397 combined, but that's not the issue. And if chip count is the issue then the 386 and 387 certainly use as many or more chips (and more support chips).