they also estimate close to a petabyte of RAM; if all the RAM is spent in leaves that is about 6-7GB per leaf. I don't know that we can say it would be unreasonable to have 1 core per leaf replica; presumably some leaves have low utilisation so it might make sense to share the core with another workload. From a capacity planning standpoint, I think they leave this open though they do indicate that they are sometimes CPU bound so don't try to compress beyond delta compression. That might suggest multiple cores per leaf.

A single core design allows a very simple concurrency model, without having to worry about cache pingponging, false sharing, or myriad other issues. The parallelism is applied at higher layers, as there are multiple replicas for each leaf and obviously they can use many cores effectively overall.

I don't see that the paper gives enough information to help us prune the design space here.