They don't lose anything since they sell the same instance which performs less with the mitigations on. Customers are paying because they need more instances.

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nebezb 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Every CPU that isn’t pegged at 100% all the time is leaving money on the table. Some physical CPU capacity is reserved, some virtual CPU capacity is reserved, the rest goes to ultra-high-margin elastic compute that isn’t sold to you as a physical or virtual CPU. They sell it to you as “serverless,” it prints cash, and it absolutely depends on juicing every % of performance out of the chips.

edit: “burstable” CPUs are a fourth category relying on overselling the same virtual CPU while intelligently distributing workloads to keep them at 100%.

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robertlagrant 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I imagine they're unable to squeeze as many instances onto their giant computers, though.

	▲	tracker1 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		There are 3-4 year old servers with slower/fewer cores still operating fine and newer servers operating as well. The generation improvements seem to outweigh a lot of the mitigations in question, not to mention higher levels of parallel work.