Polkadot's elastic scaling lets one chain run on several cores at once
A parachain on
@Polkadot normally holds a single core, so it gets one block included per relay chain block, no matter how busy it is.
Elastic scaling lets a chain take several cores and push up to three blocks into the same slot. Cores are bought with polkadot:native through coretime, either in bulk or on demand.
That moves the bottleneck to the chain's own side. Block producers must run fast enough to fill the extra cores, which raises the hardware demands.