Re: Dual core sun boxes

On Apr 12, 2005 11:39 AM, Mark Bole <makbo_at_pacbell.net> wrote:
> You can find the licensing guidelines at oracle.com which includes the
> following statement (quoted below) regarding dual core machines.
>
> What I find very confusing, is that an Intel chip with hyperthreading
> enabled will show also show up as 2 CPU's both to the OS (e.g. Linux)
> and Oracle, yet my boss in a previous assignment said that the Oracle
> sales rep told him it still only counted as one CPU for licensing
> purposes. Go figure.
>
> "When counting the number of processor licenses required, Oracle counts
> all the physical processors in a server where Oracle is installed and/or
> running. A multicore chip with N processor cores is treated as N
> processors. For example, a chip that has 2 processor cores on it, would
> need to be licensed for 2 processors, even though there is a single chip
> that holds the processors."
>
> --
> Mark Bole
> http://www.bincomputing.com
>

Mark,

That is the difference between full cores and "HypeThreading". As far as we've been informed, on IA32 the hypterthreaded processor does not count for licensing. It took more than a year to get that guideline out of Oracle ... so we had disabled hyperthreading by default on new servers. If the server only had one physical CPU, that meant patching the HAL when enabling the hypertheading functionality. One must choose wisely when selecting the proper HAL ... lest the OS be cast into the land of BSOD where only the disk of re-installation can revive it.

Mladen, please take it from here.

Paul

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