Tags: Microsoft

Oracle releases licensing terms for multi-core processor users

World’s leading database systems company Oracle has revealed a new licensing scheme, which has been designed to attract users to their applications who are using servers based on multi-core processor machines. They have introduced a price/performance decrease of 25 percent from Oracle’s previous licensing model, which had led to protests from the customers who disliked the concept of paying the company for each socket or core in a multi-core chip.

However, if the market experts are to be believed, it just might not be enough to entertain the customers. The earlier pricing scheme required the companies to pay for each core on the processor resulting in high prices for the end customers. Now, as an example a customer would be paying for seven cores if he has a multicore processor with nine cores. The case is even worsened considering multicore processor does not necessarily increase the power of the processing in the perfect ratio.

The move was made necessary after both the companies Intel and AMD announced their dual core processors in the market successively. These processors are already out in the retail market and are expected to become popular in the coming times. The move might be helped by the pricing model of Oracle’s competition. Microsoft for instance continues to charge for multi-core processors by counting each chip as one. IBM though charges at 50% ratio.

Oracle has justified their move by quoting the average performance increase by adding a new core to a multicore processor. Results have shown that they improve the performance of the machine by 60-70% and their new pricing scheme follows that logic.