In a conference call in late December, Jacqueline Woods, Oracle's vice president of global pricing and licensing strategy, said the new model calls for separate pricing schemes for the chips of different vendors.

Oracle's previous multicore pricing model, announced last July to cover all hardware systems, counted each processor core as equal to 0.75 of a single processor license. Oracle charges US$40,000 for a single processor license for an enterprise version of its database software.

Woods said the new scheme will "bring greater parity" to pricing and claimed that it represents Oracle's hardware-agnostic strategy. The new model applies to Oracle's database, middleware and some of its business applications, she said.

The new scheme assigns Sun Microsystems Inc. 's new multicore T1 processor, also known as Niagara, a 0.25 multiplier. Therefore, an eight-core processor requires only two full licenses.

Pricing for software run on servers based on Intel Corp. or Advanced Micro Devices Inc. chips will be determined by multiplying the number of processor cores in a server by 0.5, Oracle said. All other multicore chips, such as Sun's UltraSparc IV+ or IBM 's Power, will retain the 0.75 multiplier.