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.

Comments

Re:SQL Server is CPU bound?

[GodsMadClown]

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.

Anand's review

[jmichaelg]

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.

Re:But will it run...

[McKing]

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!

Re:Naming scheme...

[symbolset]

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.

Re:Opposite problem with Oracle licensing

[BillyGee]

Actually Oracle charges per socket on Standard and Standard One licenses and per Core only on Enterprise licenses.

Re:Per-core licensing?

[afidel]

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.