Cloud desktop pricing pages are not designed to be compared. This is a normalised $/CCU index for Q4 2026, built from published list prices: the Azure retail prices API, Microsoft’s Windows 365 list, and the AWS WorkSpaces price list. Same hours and stated storage for every offering, with density exposed as a variable rather than buried in a default.
Microsoft’s users-per-vCPU table is a starting point, and Microsoft says so. Doubling vCPUs returns 1.5 to 1.9 times the users, logon bursts need their own headroom, and whether autoscale saves money depends on how you set load balancing per phase.
After the Intel-side breakdown, the obvious follow-up was: does the same lottery exist on the AMD SKUs? Short answer — yes, but it plays out very differently. A pragmatic walk through Azure Das/Eas, AWS T3a/M5a/M6a/M7a/M8a, and GCP N2D/T2D/C3D, with mitigation that actually works.
When you request a Standard_D4s_v3, Azure assigns you a physical host from whatever is available in the cluster. Microsoft publishes the per-host VM densities but not the fleet mix, so the odds of landing on 2019-or-older silicon are a model, not a measurement. Here is that model, and what it means for AVD and Windows 365.
Hyperscalers fill racks with CPUs at launch, depreciate them over five to seven years, then charge you the same price while pocketing an ever-growing margin. The EUC industry is along for the ride — and the bill is about to increase.
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