Per-Core Impact on Overall Price

Under the new per-core licensing model, it will cost more to run SQL Server 2012 on hardware that uses a physical processor containing six or more cores in each.

The chart plots the cost of licensing SQL Server 2008 R2 under the per-processor licensing model and SQL Server 2012 under the new per-core model for eight different hardware configurations.

The first scenario (shown on the horizontal axis) demonstrates a single-core, single-processor server. The second set of three demonstrates two processor scenarios with increasing core counts per processor. The four remaining scenarios demonstrate four processor scenarios with increasing core counts per processor server hardware with four processors; what varies is the number of physical cores per processor.

The line for Standard edition ceases at 16 cores, since that is the upper limit of cores that it supports.

The cost of any system with four or less cores is effectively identical between the same SQL Server 2008 R2 edition and 2012 edition.