[abridgett]

IIRC they did something related a long time ago when you could get a 8 CPU box which was physically restricted to 6 CPUs purely so that it didn't fit into the "can have 8 CPU" Oracle license. About 2/3rds of the servers we sold at the time probably went to run Oracle and it gave us a massive TCO (total cost of ownership) advantage compared with other vendors, especially as the POWER chips were faster than the competition too. When most of the cost is in the software, the choice of hardware can still make a big difference.

[paulmd]

Wide SMT/CMT is also favored by Oracle's billing system - you aren't billed (afaik) per-thread but actually per-core, so 4-wide SMT or 8-wide SMT gives you an advantage over x86's 2-wide SMT.

In theory the "core multipliers" are supposed to offset this, so a "core multiplier" for POWER or SPARC should be higher - but Oracle also likes to push you towards their own products, so there is a bit of a "bundle discount" particularly on SPARC's core multiplier.