Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al...
by Spooky23 on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @11:54AM
(#5820185)
IBM has been doing this for Mainframes and pSeries/RISC boxes for a long time. Other mainframes did this as well.
On the pSeries boxes, you buy a base level of CPU cores, and you can buy licenses to unlock additional cores for a period of time. It gives you cloud-ish type features (pay for what you need, when you need it) with on-premise hardware.
It was a really common licensing model when "data processing" was all about batch workloads. Now that we're building virtualized scale-out systems versus client/server systems with fixed resource requirements, it's a model that can make sense again. If you think about it, EC2 is another way of accomplishing the same thing.
On the pSeries boxes, you buy a base level of CPU cores, and you can buy licenses to unlock additional cores for a period of time. It gives you cloud-ish type features (pay for what you need, when you need it) with on-premise hardware.
It was a really common licensing model when "data processing" was all about batch workloads. Now that we're building virtualized scale-out systems versus client/server systems with fixed resource requirements, it's a model that can make sense again. If you think about it, EC2 is another way of accomplishing the same thing.