Additional vCore-based elastic pools and single databases have been expanded for the general purpose, business critical, and hyperscale service tiers. This provides customers with more flexibility and options when migrating DTU-based deployments and right-sizing workloads for the cloud.

Azure SQL Database, Elastic Pools, and Hyperscale have two processor types to select from. Gen 4 offers up to 24 physical cores with 7GB of ram per core with attached SSD storage. The cores are based on an Intel E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) 2.4 GHz processor. Gen 5 offers up to 80 hyper-threaded cores with 5.1GB of ram per core with fast eNVM SSD storage. The cores are based on an Intel E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) 2.3 GHz processor.

With Gen 4 you can choose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, or 24 physical vCores. With Gen 5, you can choose between 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 32, 40, or 80 hyper-threaded vCores

Having the much more granular lower vCore options will certainly help organizations save money with licensing cost. Previously Gen 4 only allowed for 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 24 vCore options and Gen 5 offered 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, and 80 vCores.

Don’t forget that with any vCore option, you can leverage the Azure Hybrid benefit option to covert on-premises licenses that are covered under SA to vCore license.