[asalahli]

GP is probably refferring to blurbs like these

> Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (SELECT, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor. See below for a more detailed description of how machine utilization charges are calculated.

https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/pricing/

[wmf]

SimpleDB is over 15 years old. I guess it's the only service still using "normalized" pricing. Newer services like RDS tell you exactly which processor you're getting and how many cores.