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AMD's 12-Core Chip Cuts Software Licensing Costs
CWmike writes "AMD released on Monday its 12-core chip code-named Magny-Cours, doubling the number of cores over the previous-generation Opteron chip. While a doubling of performance is nice, another key benefit delivered by a chip with a dozen cores may be in reducing software costs. For Matt Lavallee, director of technology at MLS Property Information Network, a company that supplies real estate data, upgrading to the 12-core Opteron chip from his current quad-core chips will allow him to cut the number of servers — and his software licensing fees. While the 12-core chip costs a little more than an eight-core chip, it's 'nowhere near as much as a SQL server costs,' said Lavallee, who has been beta-testing the new chips. MLS operates 60 servers, and Lavallee said he could theoretically cut the number of servers by half but will likely reduce his server count by a third with the chip upgrade."
Reader adeelershad82 adds that AMD is hoping the new Opterons will compete with Intel in the high-volume server market.
Apparently per-core licensing is only for Windows Server, and not SQL Server.
Microsoft hasn't. Some others have though. It gets complicated though. IBM for example uses "performance units" for some of it's software. Single core x86 machines are 50 units per core. Dual Core and Quad-Core x86 machines are 25 units per core - so going single to dual costs you nothing extra but single to quad doubles the software price. They also value some processors differently than others. Certain Sun processors for example are 35 units per core. You pay a certain amount per unit.
In general though, I'm sure the software makers will catch on eventually. I specifically got a single quad core for my last SQL server to avoid a dual-cpu license (which is an extra $6k or so).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
They license per-core, so more cores per CPU can be more costly.
Huh? Windows Server is licensed:
Standard and Enterprise: per server (motherboard?)
Datacenter: per CPU socket
The last time I priced out Oracle software it was $X per CPU for the first core on a physical package and then $X/2 for each core after that. So a 12 core CPU over 2X 6 core CPUS would basically save you half a CPU license. Which given Oracle's pricing, could be a whole heck of a lot.
That was a few years back, so it may be different now.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
Yep, that's why you would like to cache as much in RAM as possible. AMD can help you there.
http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3784&p=15 ...
The Opteron 6100 series offers up to 24 DIMMs slots, the Xeon is “limited” to 18. In many cases this allows the server buyer to achieve higher amount of memory with lower costs.
Virtualization is a huge market for these cpus as well.
Anandtech has an excellent review of the new chip. The AMD chip is compared against the latest Xeon. In some situations such as OLTP and ERP, the AMD offering lives down to it's name Mangy Cores. In HTP and data-mining, Anandtech gives the nod to AMD.
So choose depending on your needs.
Think VM (VmWare/Xen/Solaris Zones) instead of parallel applications...Multi-core CPUs are great for server consolidation. We went from a row of 10 full racks of Sun gear down to 10 T2+ blades + a SAN over the last 18 months. Database / webserver / Java app server, you name it, the T2+ handles it all!
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
Postgres is already better than SQL server, Oracle is were the competition might be. Except Oracle is just so damn expensive. Postgres 9 will add lots of nice new features.
AMD commercial server CPUs are named after Formula 1 racing tracks. Their server platforms are named for Ferrari facilities. Their desktop processors are named after stars, and the desktop platforms after constellations. Cite.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Nope, Server Standard and Enterprise are per system, Datacenter is per socket (not core). Enterprise allows for 4 additional OS images on the same hardware, datacenter allows unlimited.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No, on x86/x64 it's core count/2 for Oracle software licensed per CPU (no additional license is needed for the first core).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
SQL Server licensing is per socket, unless it has changed in the past year. At my last job we were able to save a nice chunk of money by upgrading our SQL machine to single quad-cores instead of dual dual-cores.
SQL Server is per server and CAL (that is, you license your server and then buy 50 CALs for the end users) or per socket/CPU. My advice is to always use the latter option because multiplexing doesn't count as one use, so if your website uses SQL Server, you better have CALs for everyone that visits... or just license it by socket.
The CAL model is probably on its way out, it just doesn't make sense that if you have a public facing website that hits the database for authentication, even if you only have 50 real users, you still have over three billion potential users that you need to license.
We've had a lot of problems with MySQL, especially the InnoDB engine corrupting datatables. It got bad enough during development that after the proof of concept, we ported to PostgreSQL and have been running ever since. And it's been night and day. All our DB's are now postgres save for our billing system, which was written by a 3rd party. PostgreSQL is taking far more traffic than we expected and honestly we were thinking that we'd be needing DB2 or Oracle at this point, but so far PostgreSQL has handled all we've thrown at it and with the new clustering/replication/HA hot-standby features in PostgreSQL 9, it looks like we can put off that large purchase another year or so.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
To tell the truth, it was a 2.5 million euros license deal. So that's not really "wasting a day" on negotiations.
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No, the end user or device is what is licensed when buying CALs from Microsoft.
For example:
You have a database application that is accessed by some users directly (query editor or application that directly talks to SQL server.) These users or the devices they use need to be licensed.
You have a database application that a web server talks to, and through this, end users query your database indirectly (that is, when hitting the website, queries are generated indirectly to hit the database.) The end users, because they are still talking to the database albeit indirectly and causing queries to be performed will require CALs.
Lastly, suppose you have a report generator application that creates only predetermined reports (nothing on-demand) at specified times and saves the data to a file (CSV, PDF, XLS, etc) or sends an email. This requires only one CAL regardless of how many people receive the output (the file) because only one user or device is directly or indirectly hitting the database.
There's a real simple reason the licensing is like this, because otherwise what you could do is set up two SQL servers, one running SQL Server Enterprise (licensed by Server + 1 CAL as opposed to per processor, which is much more expensive) and one running SQL Server Express (free.) The Express instance would then have the Enterprise server as a linked server, and all queries would be redirected through that connection. This would effectively multiplex all of your users through one node. Microsoft doesn't want to allow this, so they've set it up so you can't.
tl;dr: the webserver is not the end user, it is not generating queries on its own, but only on demand from end users. It is those end users that need to be licensed.