What does ECU units, CPU core and memory mean when I launch a instance

Question

When I launch an instance on EC2, it gives me option for t1.micro, m1.small, m1.large etc. There is a comparision chart of vCPU, ECU, CPU cores, Memory, Instance store. Is this

Answer 1

For linuxes I've figured out that ECU could be measured by sysbench:

sysbench --num-threads=128 --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=50000 --max-requests=50000 run

Total time (t) should be calculated by formula:

ECU=1925/t

And my example test results:

|   instance type   |   time   |   ECU   |
|-------------------|----------|---------|
| m1.small          |  1735,62 |       1 |
| m3.xlarge         |   147,62 |      13 |
| m3.2xlarge        |    74,61 |      26 |
| r3.large          |   295,84 |       7 |
| r3.xlarge         |   148,18 |      13 |
| m4.xlarge         |   146,71 |      13 |
| m4.2xlarge        |    73,69 |      26 |
| c4.xlarge         |   123,59 |      16 |
| c4.2xlarge        |    61,91 |      31 |
| c4.4xlarge        |    31,14 |      62 |