I wonder if any software with per-core licensing has tried to take a possibly 'fairer' approach, for example by summing the frequency of all cores? E.g. 4x cores at 2GHz is 8GHz?
It's not that straightforward a comparison, I know, just wondering if anyone has tried something different here.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/c/73cad4e0-d0b5-4...
mentions only old Opterons.
Since we know that in any significant system the effects of latencies in various cache hierarchies, buses, networks, storage, and cross process synchronization makes enormous difference in performance it's easy to see the CPU performance alone is not really a good predictor of system performance.
Thus, with a price calculated per CPU core the solution space narrows significantly, and experience tells us that solutions where per core licensing is involved tend to include expensive, hard to support networking and storage hardware which few would buy if not per core licensing had taken that option away.
If you want to charge per unit of work, then figure out how to do just that, and don't charge for what is effectively a theoretical peak unit of load?
Currently, "price = cores" gives this weird market distortion where there's an incentive to get individually-fast, disproportionately-expensive cores to run software that might well be embarrassingly parallel. Perhaps it functions as price discrimination for those willing to put in the effort to customize systems like that. Eh, who knows.
In many ways Oracle is the low end of these solutions, but few companies actually need giant databases with thousands of drives.