Good question! We've made it possible for this whitelisted (Alpha) to let you make sure you're creating Skylakes. We'll hopefully have more details to share at NEXT in a few weeks (or immediately if you sign up!).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Where's the form to apply for Alpha? :)

Bothers me a bit with "32 cores" listed when they are 16 core/32 Thread machines.

FWIW, Azure disables hyperthreading on their servers. 1 core = 1 real core.

I try to consistently say "vCPUs", but yeah...

Given the marketing toward HPC tasks, shouldn't hyper-threading be disabled?

No? We make sure that pairs of vCPUs (hypertwins) stay together. If you'd like, you can offline your threads in the guest for a fairly similar outcome. Some of us regret that we sell an n1-standard-1 and the shared core machine types, but it's pretty nice to have a $5/month VM price point for those that want it. Most folks doing serious numerical computing end up using much larger VMs, and always crossing NUMA nodes (which is a much larger impact).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and historically focused solely on Compute Engine).

I'm curious, what is there to regret about having a shared core machine type? Some people have a use for them and appreciate the cost savings.

Disabling hyper-threading only makes sense if you're getting messed up by the OS's scheduler.