This is not quite a 'feature request' so I figured I'd post it here.

Stata-MP comes in a wide variety of license restrictions. The number of processing cores that an instance of Stata will use is determined by the flavor of Stata-MP license you have, and the cost of a license grows quite a bit with the number of cores.. A single user business license costs about $1,000/year for a Stata-MP 4-core license, and $1,755 for a Stata-MP 12-core license. None of the universities that i've worked at or attended have offered licenses with more than 4 cores to students or staff.

Over time, this kind of hardware limitation has become more constraining for ordinary users. 13th gen Intel CPUs are launching next month: the i9 variant will have 24 cores; the i7 variant commonly found in workstations will have 16 cores; even the cheapest i5 variant will have 10. I understand why this sort of price discrimination came into play when Stata-MP was developed and these licenses could distinguish between enterprise (for lack of a better word) users and everyone else - but these days, I would wager most Stata-MP users have licenses that impose a binding constraint on the amount of computing resources they can use on their own computer.

I would wager that a very large chunk of the Stata community uses institutional / organization licenses, self included, and these users have little control over what their institution chooses for the license. There's little that I can do as a student to lobby Harvard to get me access to an 8-core license. On the other hand, I don't believe any other general-purpose programming language or statistical software constrains the use of one's own computer resources in this way. Julia and R can use as many or few cores or threads as I wish. As processor manufacturers continue to stack more cores on a chip and more people get used to setting up remote virtual machines for computationally intensive tasks, Stata effectively falls farther behind competing statistical software and general-purpose programming languages that do not have this constraint. Over time, users will migrate to those alternatives, and demand for Stata licenses will go down.