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It is ok for MS for want to run 16 core systems like this but there is a major drawback.
If this new chip is for the server market then the big apps that typically run in this space (eg ORacle, SAP, SalesForce etc etc etc) are going to have to modify their per CPU Licensing costs considerably otherwise you might find that Intel goes to all the trouble of producing said CPU only to find it rejected in the corporate world.
What business (except SCO maybe) would pay the same per CPU prices for an Atom as a Xeon with it's much faster and more capable server envornoment?
I'd want to take a long hard look at the my software app costs before buying one of these.
Just go and see how much Oracle RDBMS costs on a 16CPU Box. You will be staggered. They are not alone here.
Oracle has different prices for different architectures.
For a SUN/Oracle T1 the price per core is like 25%, for T2 or Intel 50% and Power6 100%.
But why run oracle rdbms on Atom processors???
If you can afford Oracle you can afford Xeon which has more cache, faster IO.
Microsoft only charges SQL Server per socket.
And Postgresql nothing at all.





Member since:
2006-01-14
This is probably a move to make Microsoft's life easier. While they announced that they would have an ARM based OS in the future, if Intel does this Microsoft may not need to spend the money porting it. Intel will do all the work and Microsoft will reap the rewards. This benefits Intel too, steering people away from ARM.