qubit So you're saying that the licensing costs would outweigh extra sales of the cards? I don't have any numbers to make a proper judgement, but it doesn't seem right to me. Dunno.

No, but i'm saying it favors Linux / other OSes instead of Windows because of licensing costs: that is regardless of the number of CPUs / GPUs used in the supercomputer in question.Micro$oft is still operating "in the past" with the way they manage licensing and that forces customers that have high core / thread counts to look for alternatives: the higher the core counts, the more they are driven away from Windows and unless whatever is needed to run on the supercomputer only runs on Windows, they'll look for other OSes.