Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Moving To Per-Core Licensing (arstechnica.com)

rbrandis writes: Windows Server 2012 has two main editions, Standard and Datacenter. They had identical features, and differed only in terms of the number of virtual operating system instances they supported. The licenses for both editions were sold in two-socket units; one license was needed for each pair of sockets a system contained.

Windows Server 2016 reinstates the functional differences between Standard and Datacenter editions. Datacenter will include additional storage replication capabilities, a new network stack with richer virtualization options, and shielded virtual machines that protect the content of a virtual machine from the administrator of the host operating system. These features won't be found in the Standard edition.

Windows Server 2016 licensing moves to a per core model. Instead of 2012's two socket license pack, 2016 will use a 2-core pack, with the license cost of each 2016 pack being 1/8th the price of the corresponding 2 socket pack for 2012. Each system running Windows Server 2016 must have a minimum of 8 cores (4 packs) per processor, and a minimum of 16 cores (8 packs) per system.

Comments

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[BarbaraHudson]

Microsoft seems to have a fetish for making licensing complicated.

I suppose since they practically invented the concept it makes sense. But damn, how far can it go?

They didn't invent the concept. They're just following in the footsteps of Oracle, IBM, etc.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[mlts]

Here is the ironic thing. IBM with POWER7 has two modes for their chips. One is the usual functionality, where a 32 core CPU uses all 32 cores. The second mode, called TurboCore, disables half the cores... but allows the cores that are working to use the cache of their disabled neighbors, as well as run the CPU at a higher clock rate.

The reason for this mode is because Oracle, Sybase, et. al., all have per core licensing for production systems. So, having the ability to turn off a good amount of cores will cut the fee in half, and that licensing fee can be very substantial.

One advantage of Microsoft was that they licensed per CPU socket. Now, in Windows Server 2016, that changes... and I'm not surprised it did, just because of the amount of cores available on Xeons and AMD CPU chips.

Maybe this is a good thing. Customers will demand that Intel and AMD start having more oomph per core than just adding more cores to the die. This will help a lot in tasks that can't be multithreaded (fast fourier transforms if doing video, for example.) Maybe we will see the IBM TurboCore mode (not to be confused with AMD's TurboCore) used in the amd64 architecture.

AMD "modules"

[tepples]

Cores: the number of compute cores available. I think this is pretty clear.

Not on AMD it isn't. The cores of its processors since Bulldozer are sort of a hybrid between actual cores and SMT thread states.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Rockoon]

This will help a lot in tasks that can't be multithreaded (fast fourier transforms if doing video, for example.)

There have been parallel FFT's algorithms for years that scale fairly well, especially for multi-dimensional data (3D transforms get an almost a linear scaling with core count.) What the hell are you talking about?