Sun Niagara cores compared to Opterons, Power, P4s

WHAT'S A FAIR trade, four Niagara cores for an Opteron? Two Pentium 4s for a Power? An ARM and a leg for four MIPS? If you are buying an Oracle licence, it is more like a mid-sized country GDP per core, but at least it is now quantified.

Go to the hilariously named Software Investment Guide, and spend enough to buy a stock market on your own, and you will see what I mean. If you want the condensed version, go here. For the really click-impaired, the short story is that Oracle counts multi-core CPUs differently depending on which cores they are.

In a single core system, each core is worth one licence. In a multi-core system, each one is worth less than one, but can add up to more than one per socket. The familiar x86 cores, Xeons and Opterons, are worth .5 each core, Niagara is worth .25, and everything else is worth .75. This means a Niagara is worth two in total, Opteron 275s are worth one, and a Power 5+ is 1.5. Clear?

Actually, it is clear, and for once, it makes a fair bit of sense. As usual, these prices are a starting point for negotiations, and the numbers you will see are shatteringly large. So, basically, if you have a weak heart, don't look at the numbers in detail, just use the pretty multipliers. µ