5.x essential kit always 8 vCPU limit. Please refer to below link.I can see that last update was in March 2014 which is quite recent..
VMware KB: Product offerings for vSphere 5.x
I am not sure about the white paper details. However according to KB article vCPU limit has been removed in 5.5 (Except Free version of ESXi which has limitation of 8 vCPU) This is still bound to maximum limit of 64 vCPUs.
If you have already applied the licensed then can you test it and confirm? :-)