disabling cores at firmware level to reduce licensing

Perhaps you know the answer to this question: Does this effectively reduce the core count by half for licensing purposes?

On an hp proliant G7 server, there is a bios(firmware) switch that will turn off the power and completely disable half the cores on the server. Switch name "Processor Core Disable"
Option name : "Disable One-Half of cores per Physical Processor."

I know oracle does not accept "soft partitioning" such as vmware to reduce core counts, but hard partition it does accept. Shutting down power to the CPU at the firmware level really seems to me to be "hard partitioning"

Thanks for your time,

Josh C.

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