IBM changes pricing

[jmiller]

IBM Offers the 2-for-1 Dual Core

Settling a rift over whether AMD’s Opteron processor counted as two chips or one, IBM announced that it would change the pricing scheme of software licensing.

IBM and other manufacturers had been sticking to their logical guns regarding pricing. A dual core processor, in their estimate, is essentially two processors and software should be priced accordingly.

But when questioned about the actual added value of multicore processing and the prospect of keeping prices reasonable enough for the lower end Linux and Windows market, IBM changed its mind.

The end result is dual-core software at the price of single core. For lower-end servers like Linux’s OpenPower software will be priced as if they were a single processor.