Q:

EC2 Instance hardware comparison

I want to run some experiments on my laptop and on EC2. I want to choose the instance which is closest to my laptop in configuration.
I have a laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4GHz processor and 4 GB RAM. But my operating system is 32 bit so only ~2.9 GB is usable.
Which one of the EC2 instance (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) is closest to my laptop? Memory is easy to compare apples-to-apples but I am not sure how one EC2 compute unit stack up against my P8600 processor. (On EC2 also, I would run a 32 bit OS)

A:

From that website:

One EC2 Compute Unit provides the
  equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2
  GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon
  processor.

I just checked /proc/cpuinfo with m1.small and interestingly I see 4 core Xeon E5430, which was released in 2007:
cat /proc/cpuinfo # (only one of four cores is listed below)
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 23
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5430  @ 2.66GHz
stepping        : 10
cpu MHz         : 2660.000
cache size      : 6144 KB

I know that they uses Xen hypervisor, so you have VCPU of that, but I don't know how scheduler works. I checked also SuperPi benchmark:
./super_pi 20
..
End of calculation.    Time=      15.441 Sec.
End of data output.    Time=       0.080 Sec.
Total calculation(I/O) time=      15.521(       1.128) Sec.

I think that you need something between Small Instance and Large Instance, that is just Medium Instance (m1.medium), but I can't see such option in standard instances.
High-CPU Medium Instance (c1.medium) seams to be good option (especially if you require two cores), but unfortunately it has only 1.7 GB of RAM.

