Actually, Dear World, can we settle on talking about "cores", or will increasingly complex SMT/CMT implementations make even that too hard?
Or, Dear Oracle, please licence your database software in some sensible manner, rather than 1*cores for single core chips, 0.75*cores for multi-core other than AMD/Intel and Niagara, 0.5*cores for AMD/Intel multi-core and 0.25*core for Sun Niagara systems. OK, so this is still fractionally more sensible than the old Oracle 8 "power unit" pricing, where faster CPUs of the same model cost more, but still, I mean, like, guys...
Oh, and word to the wise, if you're ever talking to Sun salespeople about Ultrasparc performance, ask about the "mvalues" compared to Opteron systems. That's Sun's internal comparison metric. It's more enlightening than trying to argue with the salespeople about per-core performance based only on your own careful analysis of published benchmarks.
