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:Cry me a MS licensing costs river!

[rawler]

And the fee for linux is the cost of the admins -- the people who are good in the environment know they are good and their price goes up every year -- it takes about three years to become really proficient at most MS products - it might take half a year to really understand the linux environment and methodology if you are unfamiliar and then another 4 - 5 to gain that same profiencency equivalent.

Interestingly, I work for a company where the IT-department is a pure Microsoft-shop. Only windows-hosting and almost only C#-development for internal applications. In the technology department however, we operate a bunch of production-system for our customers, running mostly CentOS Linux. Lately, I've discovered that the Linux-admin-staff often writes simple script-solutions with their left hand, with equivalent complexity to systems written by trained developer in the IT department. And even though I personally often would rather see a more structured systematic approach to some problems, when listening to the end-users they almost always perceive they've gotten BETTER support and reliability from those scripts.

Point being that, a Linux-admin MAY cost a bit more than a windows-admin, and the learning-period might certainly be a bit longer, but I see much more productivity coming out of our Linux-crew than the windows-equivalent. More services hosted and administered per admin, and ~10 times the operational availability. Also, when more complex jobs needs being done (configuring network device, someone needs help with a tricky SQL query for a report, or needs someone to mirror a huge chunk of text-files into a searchable DB for performance), they usually come to the Linux-crew than the windows IS/IT.

What I will give the person who goes the linux route is that once you are profiecient in Linux - gaining the same proficeincy in other systems is cake - basically because the they are just easier to use in the first place.

Definitely matter of oppinion. Personally, I've never found anything "easy" about windows. Sure, the very limited amount of things you can do within three button-presses is usually simple enough (interestingly the same goes for modern Linux Desktops/Simple Server Setups). However, once something breaks, or you need/desire to stride outside the comfy gui-box, just forget about it. (IMHO) For example, a standard CentOS5 server install comes with high-availability software that from commercial vendors (IBM and HP, I don't know if Microsoft can even match the fully distributed transactional storage components) START at ~100K euro. For those money, I can let one high-school self-taught Linux hacker spend 2 years in researching and fine-tuning for the JUST the entrance fees of the proprietary variant. How would you estimate my chances of getting some more use out of that admin meanwhile?

Re:But will it run...

[Bigjeff5]

Since multi-threading is so hard to do right, most of what you are going to do is consolidation.

So instead of having 6 separate servers, you just shove buttloads of RAM in a single server and set up a SAN for your data storage, and move all 6 servers to one box. You can even split it up further than that - if you have a couple servers that need to be separate from each other, but don't really need a lot of processing power, you can put those on a single core apiece. So you could potentially consolidate up to 12 servers into one box with virtual servers. More than likely you'll only get 6 or 8 out of it, because dual cores do help a lot, but still there's the potential to turn two racks of servers into one server and a SAN.

You save on space, you save on energy, and you ultimately save on hardware (though SANs are expensive, so if you don't need the speed you could go to a standard NAS setup). To expand your data storage you just need to expand your SAN, so you can add servers and storage independently of each other. All of these are major up sides to going this route.

Going from a 60 server setup to a 10 server setup has a massive potential for savings.

Re:ever heard of MySQL?

[Low Ranked Craig]

I have an SME ERP background, and while all of what you say is correct, in my fairly extensive experience (since 1987) as a VAR and working on the inside at Sage, it is rare to run across a customer, at least in the mid-market ($5 to $50 million in revenues) that actually needs all the features of MSSQL. Hell, most of them do just fine with c-isam or btrieve style files. Most companies in this segment can do just fine with MySQL. Also, there are lots of tools out there. None quite as good as SQL Studio, I'll give you that, but Navicat, for example, is pretty good and affordable. My biggest issue with MySQL is what Oracle is going to do (or not do) with it...

Re:Cry me a MS licensing costs river!

[mcrbids]

There's nothing that easy about MS technologies. They're superficially easy, sure. But there's quite a lot underneath that.

Well, I certainly agree with you there! But what bothers me more about Windows technology isn't that it's as complex/powerful/intricate as comparable Linux technologies, as much as it's opaque.

You get a binary to install, and there you go. Enjoy, and hope to God that somebody at the other end of the 800 tech support line has mercy on your poor, sorry soul. Because you have virtually no recourse otherwise.

Compare/contrast with more open solutions, which provide options when the chips are down. How many times I've pined for a decent documented config file when rooting thru the menus to fix some obscure problem!