For example, an 8-core general-purpose Managed Instance costs $1,472.75 per month, and the SQL Server licensing component makes up $584 of that cost, so the total cost would be $889 per month ...

But Microsoft will only charge us for each socket in its “per processor” multi-core SQL Server licensing policy. With a new quad-core processor, we only have to pay for one processor license ...

On identically configured dual-node clusters with quad-core CPUs, the cost of implementing HA is 58% lower using Standard edition of SQL Server and a SANless clustering tool. Bump those up to 24-core ...