[kolbusa]

I had in mind a scenario in which a cloud provider would have access to everything but would be disabling things and selling those nodes cheaper (or, rather, sell nodes with extra features for more), while maintaining a uniform fleet of nodes.

[michaelt]

If a cloud provider has a 16-core processor and customers who want 8-core processors, they simply put two customer VMs per processor, each only able to see 8 of the cores.

Why disable half the cores and leave them unsold, when selling both halves makes you twice as much money?