1) There are Xeon Scalable processor packages with 48 and 56 cores on the market, thus with 96 or 112 simultaneous threads. Cloud providers here probably sell t

1) There are Xeon Scalable processor packages with 48 and 56 cores on the market, thus with 96 or 112 simultaneous threads. Cloud providers here probably sell that thread as "one vCPU", although 2) ... they could also time-share one core to as many virtual cores as they like, even more than the real number of simultaneous threads. This seems to make sense for better utilization of part of capacity, but I have no idea if they do it. Probably not for marketing reasons, they don't want to support an idea that their vCPUs are weaker than those of the competitor. Small providers are more likely to do this, I think, much less concerns about PR. 3) Big GAFA-like corps have access to specialized hardware from Intel. The cpus they operate may not be publicly known.