I have a development box soon to go live. The Network Admins say it has 2 processors and thus is eligible for Standard Edition One Licensing metric (max 2 CPUs).

The CPU_COUNT ini param has been set during DB creation as 4. Indeed when I check the box (Windows 2003) it shows 4 CPUs in action in the memory tab in Task Manager.

Device Manager also shows 4 processors: 2 x Intel Xeon 2.5Ghz processors and 2 x 'Processors' using MS processr.sys drivers.

Are these 'real' CPUS? How does Oracle quantify the # of CPUs?

you can understand why I don't want to leap in ask Sales or Support about this.