It's definitely a timeslice, and that throws off your comparison wildly. Otherwise you'd be able to rent a 32 core dedicated machine at the same place for $48 a month. Can you?

it mentions "dedicated resources", but it's unclear whether this applies to CPU

it might throw the comparison off if there was variation in performance at different times, but there isn't

cores scale with RAM, you cannot rent 32 with 512MB

They're probably talking about dedicated RAM, although even then I wouldn't trust it not to be overprovisioned up to 2:1 on NVME swap.

Hetzner dedicated cores come with 4gb of memory per vCPU for reference.

1.2 GBP/mo for a dedicated core is wildly off market price. There's no way they'd be able to make a profit, so either they're going out of business tomorrow or it's not dedicated.

hourly benchmarks confirm it's definitely DDR4 RAM, standard SATA SSD with acceptable IOPS, and decent enough network. it's the budget branch of the biggest hosting provider so maybe they can afford to. how long it lasts only time will tell