Editorial standard

Methodology

compute.info is a data publication. Accuracy, provenance, and useful context take priority over catalog size or update theater.

Source hierarchy

1. Tier A: official machine-readable catalogs, APIs, model cards, specifications, or benchmark results.
2. Tier B: authoritative vendor documentation and pricing pages without stable structured data.
3. Tier C: reputable independent measurements and publications.

Forums, social posts, and comparison sites can trigger investigation but are not canonical evidence.

Normalization

We convert values only when the comparison remains faithful to the original offer. API text prices are shown in US dollars per one million tokens. Cached, batch, long-context, regional, and modality-specific prices remain separate when they materially differ.

VM prices remain in each vendor's native currency and an identified representative region or published price scope. A monthly value prefixed with “≈” is the hourly list price multiplied by 730 hours; it is not a vendor billing cap. The catalog generally favors meaningful entry, balanced, compute, memory, storage, Arm, GPU, and accelerator representatives over every near-duplicate size. For comprehensively ingested provider APIs, all listed SKUs are retained: regionally unavailable SKUs are labeled as such and receive no fabricated price. We preserve whether compute is shared, burstable, or dedicated and whether storage, outbound transfer, public IPv4, and tax are included or explicitly mark them as unspecified.

Provenance contract

Each record includes a stable identifier, source URL and type, retrieval time, effective date when known, region, currency, confidence grade, notes, and publication status. Source links are visible beside the data they support.

Model and hardware estimates

Open-model specifications come from creator-maintained Hugging Face model cards. “Open-weight” means weights are downloadable under the stated license; it does not automatically mean an OSI-approved open-source license.

Hardware-fit estimates use decimal gigabytes and a conservative planning allowance for quantized formats: 5 bits per weight for Q4 and 9 for Q8, followed by 20% loading overhead. This allows for scales, block metadata, and mixed-precision tensors. Published artifact sizes should replace the estimate when a specific GGUF or safetensors build is selected.

Fit labels cover estimated model weights only. KV cache, context length, activations, runtime scratch space, drivers, display reservation, backend compatibility, and CPU/GPU offload can materially change capacity and speed.

Validation and corrections

Automated checks reject duplicate identifiers, invalid URLs, negative prices, unknown currencies, and malformed timestamps. Material changes receive review before publication.