The Economist, has an article which deals with the issue of how multi core processors is going to affect "Enterprise Software Licensing". There has been a lot of talk about it in the blogsphere. Recently oracle made an announcement regarding its licensing policy with respect to multi core processing, "The database and applications vendor will no longer charge an individual license for each processor core, instead defining each processor core on multicore chips as 0.75 of a processor, according to Jacqueline Woods, Oracle's vice president of global pricing and licensing".

Some interesting excerpts from the Economist article:

• FOR the past 40 years, companies around the world have grown accustomed to a doubling in computing power every 18 months to two years---fulfilling a remarkable forecast made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, a semiconductor powerhouse based in Silicon Valley.


• The real losers in the pending upheaval could well be software suppliers. Firms such as Oracle, SAP and IBM, whose industrial-strength programs are the bedrock of business, could be badly bruised in the process.


• For many, the choice could come down starkly to accepting costlier new ways of being billed for the corporate software they depend upon for their livelihoods, or biting the bullet and switching to "open source" programs that may be free to license but have plenty of hidden costs.


• In April, Intel and AMD announced separately that they would be delivering dual-core versions of their high-end processors later this year. the leading server manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and IBM, have begun taking orders for their new dual-core computer systems.


• With the wholesale switch to dual-core processing, some software firms feel they are about to be short-changed. If two cores on a single chip can do twice the work of a single processor, they argue, then customers paying licence fees based on the number of processors running their software (one of the most common forms of software licensing) will be getting a free ride on half the new cores being deployed. Actually, because of internal losses and design restrictions, dual-core chips tend to do the work of anything from 1.3-1.8 comparable single-core processors, depending on the applications they are running. But the free-ride argument still stands.