As a "newer" engine, SQL Server has a couple of tricks that aren't found in most other systems, including intra-query parallelism across multiple threads. This capability requires occasional reshuffling of data between threads, which makes SQL Servers internals a little more like a distributed DBMS (think Netezza/Teradata) than the wonderful, but ancient, Postgres. All of which means that SQL Server has a larger palette of execution options and some different optimization decisions than PG.