Be careful on Standard Edition 2 CPU Licensing

Hi,

Today I looked for some dedicated servers for two of my customers. They have Standard Edition 2 (SE2) License. So this license says you can have only 1 CPU socket on the machine it does not matter how many core it has! this is really great reason to use SE2 but Oracle also says, at most 16 thread of a single cpu socket system will be used by database. So it does not matter if your 1 cpu has 32 cores (64 thread) oracle will use only 16 thread of them. Even this is OK if you find a cpu which has really strong cores, 16 thread will be enough for many jobs  but (a big “but”)  Oracle says something very important on their licensing aggrement:

When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One, Standard Edition 2 or Standard Edition in the product name, a processor is counted equivalent to a socket; however, in the case of multi-chip modules, each chip in the multi-chip module is counted as one occupied socket.

there is something called “multi-chip modules” or MCM (or as far as I understand “die count”) and if you cpu has more than one of those Oracle will license every each of them. so what are they? they are actually cpu sockets. for example AMD Epyc 7502 has 32 cores and it is a quite strong cpu but this cpu has 4 “multi-chip module” (MCM) which means this cpu has 4 x 8 core cpus (total 32 cores). you think that mutli-chip modules as cpu slots on the “cpu” instead of motherboard. that way if you use this cpu on your server, even if there is only 1 cpu socket on the motherboard, since this cpu has 4 MCM, oracle will license it for 4 SE2 license.

So be careful while choosing your cpus. you might be charged much more than you think.

Edit: I must also add something. I couldn’t give the example as it is supposed to be (about AMD Epyc 7502). this documentation says something too: https://www.oracle.com/assets/lic-def-rules-v030819-5390819.pdf

Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 may only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 2

so since AMD epyc 7502 has 4 multi chip module, you can not license it for Oracle SE2. it must be at most 2 MCM.