New multiplicators for Oracle

Oracle changed their core multiplicators for software licensing. You can find the new version of their Oracle Processor Core Factor Table at the usual location. They didn´t changed the multiplicators for SPARC CPU but the changes are nevertheless positive ones: A Power6 core has now a multiplicator of 1 instead of 0.75 like SPARC64 or UltraSPARC T2. This levels the playing field a little bit: In the past the Power6 could have a pricing advantage despite their incredible expensive cores (or what IBM calls a core) by the multiplicator for Oracle licensing. This advantage doesn´t exist any longer. The second interesting change: The Itanium isn´t in the 0.75 range of high-end multicores … it´s now in the x86 multicore group with a core factor of 0.5.