vCPU
Also known as: Virtual CPU
A vCPU is a virtual CPU — a share of a physical processor core allocated to a cloud instance, and the primary unit cloud providers use to size and price compute.
On most instance families a vCPU maps to a hardware hyperthread. "Dedicated" vCPU instances guarantee that CPU time, while "shared" or "burstable" instances (such as AWS t-series or DigitalOcean Basic Droplets) share cores and can throttle under sustained load — which is why like-for-like price comparisons should hold the dedicated-vs-shared distinction constant.
Instance prices scale roughly linearly with vCPU count, so vCPU is a useful common denominator when comparing across providers.
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