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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.
Fair enough, but my Linux licensing costs won't change!
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Almost all of the enterprise software we buy charges by the CPU and by the seat. For this purpose a CPU core is the same thing as seperately socketed CPU. Whatever about OS savings I think you'd save more in hardware and running costs than you would on software.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
Oracle, MS and others change the licensing to require a charge per core.
No sig for you!!
Is that software licensing is a rip off to begin with.
Of course, don't expect that to last long considering how multi-core things are getting.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
In my experience, it's rare for SQL Servers to be CPU bound, they're almost invariably IO bound, and having more cores won't help you when your disks are the bottleneck. I could see excitement over lowering per-machine costs for something like a renderfarm, but it doesn't seem likely to materialize for Databases.
I read the internet for the articles.
Very clever, AMD. Naming your chip after a location in Europe as usual, but this time making it able to be read as "Many-Cores" (or possibly more accurately "Many-Core", I don't really know how to pronounce French words). Very clever indeed...
Rendering both posts moot is the fact that the 12-core Opteron performs like a 6-core Xeon, meaning that licensing would be the same per-socket anyhow since you wouldn't be able to reduce the number of servers/processors any more than you already can.
You have to understand the mindset behind this kind of people.
They use a privative SQL server, but that's not it. They also use a privative OS, CMS, ERP, etc,etc.
You'll find people that use either mostly Free Software, or mostly privative software. 50% / 50% or other rational "whatever fits" scenarios are hard to come by. People either believe that Free Software is a better alternative, or they believe that having a big soulless corporation behind their software means they'll get better software.
Also, many companies have managers and techies that know nothing but windows, ASP and MsSQL and are scared of changing anything.
People usually complain about Free Software zealots using nothing but GPLed software, but there are privative software zealots out there too, and they don't analyze their options either, they just compulsively buy the most expensive option from $VENDOR.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Sorry, MySQL isn't in the slightest comparible to MSSQL or Oracle. It doesn't have half the features, it's buggy, and it's generally slower. Tooling is also poor in comparison. It's still, unforunately, a toy.
MySQL does well in the web. That's because it's free licence is suited to horizontal expansion - throw lots of cheap servers at it (where such expansion is possible). Tight integration with PHP just puts the icing on the cake. However, compared to other stacks it's poor. Both MSSQL/ASP.net and Oracle/Java-application-server perform significantly better (often factors) than the MySQL/PHP stack.
So buying Microsoft/Oracle might seem expensive, that is often not the case.
But the web isn't the world for databases. There are lots of other usages.
MSSQL is for example is ideal for SMEs, you get a heck of a lot for your money - very well performing database with mature, well integrated and well performing stack. Plus a really nice BI implementation built right in, with nice easy GUIs for dummies / business users.
Oracle's the daddy. It's complex but it's a more capable db than MSSQL. As a developer you have fine grain control over how the engine works. For certain enterprise applications it's the only real option (apart from going to IBM). I've been lead to believe that it's the performance king too.
If you're serious about open source databases, then you need to use a serious open source database as an example. Both Ingres and PostgreSQL are mature, well performing and fully featured databases which are available under an open source license. They're what you should be comparing with SQL Server / Oracle. Not MySQL.
As computers get faster, software becomes more bloated and runs slower.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The fact that one can argue about it means it is too damn complex.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
LMAO.. that pretty much sums it up: you handle the servers in your mom's basement and that's about it, ricer boy.