> The fact is that the x86 cores have focused so much on performance per core, largely due to per-core licensing costs that dwarf CPU hardware costs, that it has led to a window for a cloud-native processor segment designed to provide the correct level of performance per core tied to cloud vCPUs, but then offer massive numbers of cores.
Why is the x86 core count related to the per-core licensing costs?
If you're paying for software on a per-core basis, you want fast cores, which means big cores. This also works well on desktop since a lot of stuff depends on single-core speeds, so it's basically where x86 has settled in. If you're scaling a workload across many thousands of cores and don't need specialized features, this makes a lot less sense, and smaller/slower cores are very competitive. ARM CPUs like Ampere and dense variants of x86 are targeting this niche.
Why is the x86 core count related to the per-core licensing costs?