Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[pgerassi]

Yet Intel does give away CPUs to HPC clusters and you don't take it into account. And it isn't just a few hundred a quarter that they do it for.

The real money is in the commercial segment and there they almost always use a RDBMS like Oracle or DB2. Since that is bundled in software, the CPU portion of server revenue is tiny. Ask Dan3 at SI. He doesn't want to go to quad core CPUs because the extra two cores costs his company $30K for the extra two cores worth of software license fees (plus the extra $6K in annual license and service fees). And that is per socket. Now if the server is virtualized, that might be covered by the extra servers that don't need to be bought and the license costs for them.

However at $30K a populated socket, even a cost of $9-10K a CPU is buried underneath the socket software costs. At $1K a CPU, its the BMOC. Until software licenses are again priced by CPU performance instead of per core, this will be the drawback to going the multicore route. And as of now, likely pushes the use of SQL and database accelerators to go around this overriding cost.

Thinking otherwise puts you into fantasy land, while I am in the real world, complicated and nasty as it is.