On the other hand, Intel's x86 cores are much faster per-core than its competitors, so core-based licensing could end up being cheaper for the same performance. This could also partly be why Oracle is pushing for many cores in their latest SPARC processors.
Are you sure? Yes, Power8 has impressive single threaded benchmarks. But Intel has long dominated the single threaded performance market due to their fab edge and their economies of scale (lets them put more into R&D than IBM).
Just wondering if you have more benchmarks than what looks like Spec benchmarks? I'm definitely interested if another manufacturer can beat Intel at single-threaded performance.
