Amazon Makes It Almost Impossible To Calculate Their “Virtual CPU” Equivalent

So, it looks like I’m not the only one trying to figure out Amazon EC2 virtual CPU allocation.  Slashdot runs the story (and a heated debate, as usual) on the subject of Amazon’s non-definitive virtual CPUs:

ECU’s were not the simplest approach to describing a virtual CPU, but they at least had a definition attached to them. Operations managers and those responsible for calculating server pricing could use that measure for comparison shopping. But ECUs were dropped as a visible and useful definition without announcement two years ago in favor of a descriptor — virtual CPU — that means, mainly, whatever AWS wants it to mean within a given instance family.

A precise number of ECUs in an instance has become simply a “virtual CPU.”