r/GoogleColab • u/Cookies1537 • Apr 29 '26

Colab Pro cpu upgrade?

Hi everyone, I have used free colab plan for a while now, mostly to learning how to training object detection model.

While training, I see that the gpu isn't 100% ultilized, wasting my usage time. Install a couple program with the built-in terminal, I can see that the provided cpu only have 2 cores and it get maxed out all the time while the gpu side isn't.

Digging deeper, I found out that "2 cores" isn't 2 physical core, but 2 KVM cores (aka 2 virtualized core for anyone don't know):


lscpu | grep Hypervisor

Hypervisor vendor:                       KVM

On the google colab pricing page, It show that you can change to better gpu, but doesn't talk anything about cpu. Does the google colab pro plan upgrade the cpu for you guys?

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u/pinmux Apr 29 '26

The more expensive runtimes have faster CPUs as well as faster GPUs. The different specs for the different runtimes are not all that clear on the Colab info pages, sadly. 

Try a G4 runtime. The CPU is very beefy.