Well they bill you for the instance not for some unit of computation. I'd imagine many users of E2 instances don't realize that they could be getting much much worse performance per vcore than if they picked a different instance type.
From Google's perspective, if the hardware is paid for, still reliable, and they can still make money on it, they can put new hardware in new racks rather than replacing the old hardware. This suggests Google's DC's aren't space constrained but I'm not surprised after looking at a few via satellite images!
Well not exactly. In my mind the price of running such old cpus for say the last (say, 4?) years would have been higher than buying new+new runtime costs. Those would definitely be considered opportunity costs that ought to be avoided.
> the price of running such old cpus for say the last (say, 4?) years would have been higher than buying new+new runtime costs
I don't think this is true, because the old chips don't use more power outright[1][2][3]. In fact in many cases new chips use more power due to the higher core density. The new chips are way more efficient because they do more work per watt, but like I said in my previous comment you aren't paying for a unit of work. The billing model for the cloud providers is that of a rental: you pay per minute for the instance.
There's complexity here like being able to pack more "instances" (VM's) onto a physical host with the higher core count machines, but simply saying the new hardware is cheaper to run I don't think is clear cut.
True, although they could very well do upgrades on the kind of VPS' where they were already oversubscribed. If you're not paying for physical cores I don't think that argument works.
Sure but my comment was about Google's E2 instances specifically, which are billed this way. For Cloud Run or the Google Services they host, I agree it would be odd for them to use old chips given the inefficiency.
From Google's perspective, if the hardware is paid for, still reliable, and they can still make money on it, they can put new hardware in new racks rather than replacing the old hardware. This suggests Google's DC's aren't space constrained but I'm not surprised after looking at a few via satellite images!