IBM Sets Software Prices for Sun's Niagara-2 Processors

Published: September 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last July, in an effort to simplify its pricing for software running across different processor architectures, performance levels, and core counts, IBM announced a software pricing scheme that was more or less based on performance. The pricing methodology, called Processor Value Unit (PVU), was updated this week for Sun Microsystems' forthcoming "Niagara-2" Sparc T2 processors.

With PVU pricing, IBM stops counting cores for processors and rather assigns each core, based on architecture and some unknown performance rating, a relative performance rating per processor core in the CPU package. Then, as customers buy one of the 350 software programs from Big Blue that are priced based on PVUs, they are charged based on the aggregate PVUs of the system or partition of a system that is supporting that software.

As I suggested a year ago, these performance metrics are based as much on whim as they are on actual performance comparisons. For instance, in July of this year, IBM assigned the Power6 processor, which has two cores running at 4.7 GHz, a rating of 120 PVUs per core. That's a 20 percent increase over the PVU ratings of Power5 and Power5+ cores, which were set at 100 PVUs per core. The Power6 core delivers twice the performance, so it should have been given a rating of 200 PVUs per core if IBM were being fair. Basically, customers who move to IBM's latest Power processors are going to get a price break on software (relative to performance) or pay a 20 percent premium (relative to the core count)--it depends on how you want to look at it.

With Sun's Niagara-2 chip, due in systems later this year, IBM has set the PVU rating to 50 per core, up 67 percent compared to the 30 PVU per core rating that the Niagara-1 chip has. The Niagara-2 and Niagara-1 chips both have eight cores, which means under the old per-core pricing scheme, software costs would have been the same on these two architectures. With Niagara-2, Sun is adding more threads per core (eight, to be specific, up from four threads in the Niagara-1 cores) and the resulting machine will do about twice as much work on thread-friendly workloads like databases and Web servers.

The 50 PVU rating of the Niagara-2 core puts it in the same class as IBM's own PowerPC 970 and Power5 quad-core modules as well as for X64 processors from Intel and AMD. Intel's dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000, Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC, Sun's UltraSparc-IV, IBM's System z mainframe engines, and any other single-core processor is rated at 100 PVUs per core for the pricing scheme.

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