[jiggawatts]

That is basically never true any more, even in large government and large enterprise.

Microsoft has dialled up the pricing to match Oracle, which means that now everyone has to be so frugal with cores assigned to their DB servers that any software performance benefits are simply lost. Cheaper or open source database engines can be assigned 10x or even 100x the compute capacity at the same cost.

One “trick” Microsoft pulled was to quietly change per-core licensing to per-vCPU (hyper-thread) if you use SQL in the cloud. This means that it costs 2x as much as it used to on-prem.

Then they have the nerve to publish marketing about how you can “save money” by migrating to Azure.

Narrator: You can’t.

[electroly]

Re: vCPUs, the newest generation of AMD in AWS is 1 vCPU = 1 core, no SMT, so try to choose that generation if you have to run in AWS.

[jiggawatts]

In Microsoft Azure the HT-off feature has had a bunch of previews that all quietly disappeared without ever becoming generally available. I'm guessing management noticed that this capability would eat into Microsoft SQL Server (and Windows Server) licensing revenue.

Similarly, I've noticed that all of the managed Azure SQL products lag behind on the latest CPU generations by many years. "You can just scale up at your expense and our profit!" is the response when you read about this in the forums.