When an Enterprise node is started up, it will accept a --num-cores argument. This determines how many cores the process will use. This defaults to the number of cores available on the system.
When registering the node in the catalog, this will be used as the core_count on the node registration.
The total number of cores across all nodes in the catalog will need to be compared against the number of cores in their license to determine if node registration can proceed, i.e., if there are enough cores available in their license to accommodate the new node.