Yep, that's true. You have to use the DC SKUs which (IIRC) aren't the same silicon either. Worse: some of the server SKUs are restricted for market segmentation

Yep, that's true. You have to use the DC SKUs which (IIRC) aren't the same silicon either. Worse: some of the server SKUs are restricted for market segmentation where your ML and hashing performance is bad but video is good (and the other way around). The silly thing about it is that most of the special engines can now be flashed into an FPGA which is becoming more common in the big clouds so special offload engines aren't that big of a deal when they are missing. So in some cases you can have your cake and eat it too; massive parallel processing and specialised processing in the same server box without resorting to special tricks (as long as it's not suddenly getting blocked in future software updates).