why when creating e2-small it shows it has 2 vCPU and when checking configuration it shows it has only 1 vCPU on gcp?

Question

• This is what I get when creating a e2-small machine

• This is what I get when checking the machine after creation:

• This is what is shown on the page https://cloud.google.com/compute/vm-instance-pricing:

*This is what I get when using cat /proc/cpuinfo:

Answer 1

In your first screenshot, it shows **e2-small (2 vCPU, 2 GB memory).

In your second screenshot, it shows 1 shared core.

One CPU core is 2 vCPUs. Therefore, your first and second screenshots are showing the same thing.

A vCPU is a hyper-thread. Each CPU core consists of two hyper-threads.

How does Hyper-Threading work? When Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology is active, the CPU exposes two execution contexts per physical core. This means that one physical core now works like two “logical cores” that can handle different software threads.

What Is Hyper-Threading?