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A question frequently arises about the definition of a CPU for purposes of counting.
When determining the number of CPUs in a host machine, FairCom counts each CPU reported by the operating system (be that a physical CPU, a CPU core, an SMT thread, or a virtual machine).
Unlike many database vendors, we allow the end-user to bind the FairCom DB Server to a given number of CPUs in the machine. For example, a FairCom DB Server supporting 4 CPUs can be run on a machine with 8 CPUs by binding the FairCom DB Server to 4 of those CPUs. Further, the pricing for each additional CPU is an incremental price rather than a 100% increase as with most other database providers. This helps FairCom pricing to better reflect the benefits of multiple cores and threads.
In some cases, the system calls provided by the operating system do not distinguish between actual processors and SMT threads. This causes the operating system to report the number of CPUs as the number of processor cores times the number of SMT threads running on each core. For example, a system may have four processor cores each of which has two SMT threads causing a total of eight CPUs to be reported. For example, the Windows Task Manager shows eight CPUs on systems that have a single, quad-core, hyper-threaded chip:
