title: Is 1 vCPU on Google Compute Engine basically half of 1 physical CPU core?
body: <p>Google's <a href="https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types" rel="noreferrer">Machine types page</a> states that:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>For the n1 series of machine types, a virtual CPU is implemented as a
    single hardware hyper-thread on a 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5 (Sandy
    Bridge), 2.5 GHz Intel Xeon E5 v2 (Ivy Bridge)...etc</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Assuming that <a href="https://www.howtogeek.com/194756/cpu-basics-multiple-cpus-cores-and-hyper-threading-explained/" rel="noreferrer">a single physical CPU core with hyper-threading appears as two logical CPUs to an operating system</a>, then if the n1-standard-2 machine that is described as 2 virtual CPUs and 7.5 GB of memory, then this essentially means 1 CPU core, right?</p>
  
  <p>So if I'm trying to <a href="https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.3/guides/hardware_sizing/#general-hardware-guidelines-for-a-single-node" rel="noreferrer">follow hardware recommendations for an InfluxDB instance</a> that recommends 2 CPU cores, then I should aim for a Google Compute Engine machine that has 4vCPUs, correct?</p>