Comment by wmf
8 years ago
A cloud "vCPU" is a hyperthread and in good providers (EC2/GCE) they are properly pinned to the hardware such that, for example, a 4-vCPU VM would be placed on two dedicated physical cores. This was probably done for performance originally but now it also has security benefits. You can get hints of this by running lstopo on VMs and similar bare metal servers.
On second and third tier cloud providers, the vCPUs tend to be dynamically scheduled so that they may share cores with other VMs.
Here's lstopo output on a 4-core AWS instance to illustrate your point: https://instaguide.io/info.html?type=c5.xlarge#tab=lstopo