10gR2 RAC on RISC or X86-64 hardware

I have a discussion with a colleague, Technical consultant with a hardware/IBM/AIX background about the benefits of the use of IBM p- series hardware instead of x86-64 hardware.

His these is that because of Oracle Licensing RISC based hardware - especially the IBM hardware - always will be more profitable then a Linux/ASM architecture on X86-64 hardware.

 From his experience he has a " rule of thumb" that there is a maximum of 250 concurrent " users" on a RISC based CPU and a maximum of 100 concurrent " users" on a Intel-based CPU. So because of the CPU licenses he argued that Oracle on Intel-based CPU will mostly more expensive then on RISC-based CPU, especially in the case of RAC (with EE).

I have the feeling that there is no valid foundation for his these, but i am not a hardware man at all, so it is difficult for me to argue.

Anyone who can give some contra-arguments or anyone who can persuade me that he is right?

Joop Gijsbers

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