I don't understand how clients get to make the technical decisions.
Wow. I assume you're referring to "non-technical customers" here. Nonetheless, they can and do make demands like this. At my day job, I've been told by the decision making end-user at a potential customer that "a single CPU server is just a PC." This is in regards to running Oracle on a single CPU server in order to keep license costs manageable. So, they're now looking at doubling (or worse) their licensing fees for the privilege of saying their installation runs on a multi-CPU server, even though there has been no evidence that a single CPU would not be adequate.
