> If most of your cores are idle you will add more work to the server, or you will have bough one with fewer cores to begin with. I don't think you understood

> If most of your cores are idle you will add more work to the server, or you will have bough one with fewer cores to begin with. I don't think you understood the issue. It's not that cores will be idle. It's that the bulk of their workloads is not performance-oriented. They are there to context-switch while handling IO-bound tasks. You'd be wasting money if you pay a premium on high-performance cores if you're using them in IO-bound workloads. You waste money buying the processor, and you waste money powering performance-oriented cores to run workloads that do not benefit from this performance. For the same budget, you are far better off having a larger number of efficient cores than a smaller number of high-performance cores. Because you are running more efficient cores, you can cram more of them in the same package without ramping up cooling needs. Think about it for a second: where is the performance bottleneck of your server if the bulk of its load consists of IO? You should turn your conspiracy theory upside down and ask yourself how come a cloud provider is interested in running more cores in smaller spaces and in spending less energy cooling them.