[throwawaypath]

They also charge you for every instruction cycle on the machines (look up MIPS licensing) you own. Imagine if NVIDIA started doing that with their GPUs: spend $2500 on a GPU and then pay NVIDIA a royalty fee for every hour of workload you put on it.

[kev009]

Two different product lines. POWER systems are sold by the socket, on the higher end sometimes you get some license disabled cores but it's usually trivial. Mainframes are the opposite, you usually get the full monty machine that is extremely limited by licensing.