In the UK, for enterprise, majority of the big $$ licensing is by Core, not Proc. Enterprise just doesn't get this hardware visibility anymore.
Case in point, they lease the infrastructure from datacentres, they lease VMs, and VM licensing is by Platform-> Core+Mem. Storage is peanuts in comparison and usually very flexible.
The datacentres for cloud/vms, yes, they would have this choice and VM consolidation would be their priority. But they generally buy prebuilt servers directly from OEMs. They buy packaged solutions, en-masse. They don't mess with maintenance and support.
Larger mem requests (and HUGE associated costs) are typically for archaic dinosaurs like AIX/Sparc/HP UX that are becoming a smaller and smaller part of enterprise infrastructure. I think health and government are the two segments really holding onto these platforms.
However, some of the enterprise major software costs are huge... hardware pales in comparison. From that perspective, it can be the Proc.
Sent from HTC 10
(Opinions are own)