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Comment by wstuartcl | Hacker News Reader

the tests were for these local (metal direct connect ssds). The issue is not network overhead -- its that just like everything else in cloud the performance of 10 years ago was used as the baseline that carries over today with upcharges to buy back the gains.

there is a reason why vcpu performance is still locked to the typical core from 10 years ago when every core on a machine today in those data scenters is 3-5x or more speed basis. Its cause they can charge you for 5x the cores to get that gain.

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> there is a reason why vcpu performance is still locked to the typical core from 10 years ago

That is transparently nonsense.

You can disprove that claim in 5 minutes, and it makes literally zero sense for offerings that aren't oversubscribed

vcpu performance is still locked to the typical core from 10 years ago

No. In some cases I think AWS actually buys special processors that are clocked higher than the ones you can buy.

The parent claims that though aws uses better hardware, they bill in vcpus whose benchmarks are from a few years ago, so that they can sell more vcpu units per performant physical cpu. This does not contradict your claim that aws buys better hardware.

It's so obviously wrong that I can't really explain it. Maybe someone else can. To believe that requires a complete misunderstanding of IaaS.

GP is probably refferring to blurbs like these

> Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (SELECT, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor. See below for a more detailed description of how machine utilization charges are calculated.

https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/pricing/

SimpleDB is over 15 years old. I guess it's the only service still using "normalized" pricing. Newer services like RDS tell you exactly which processor you're getting and how many cores.

You are talking about real CPU not virtual cpu

Generally each vCPU is a dedicated hardware thread, which has gotten significantly faster in the last 10 years. Only lambdas, micros, and nanos have shared vCPUs and those have probably also gotten faster although it's not guaranteed.

In fairness, there are a not insignificant number of workloads that do not benefit from hardware threads on CPUs [0], instead isolating processes along physical cores for optimal performance.

[0] Assertion not valid for barrel processors.

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