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

ECU = EC2 Compute Unit. More from here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_and_why_did_you_introduce_it

Amazon EC2 uses a variety of measures to provide each instance with a consistent and predictable amount of CPU capacity. In order to make it easy for developers to compare CPU capacity between different instance types, we have defined an Amazon EC2 Compute Unit. The amount of CPU that is allocated to a particular instance is expressed in terms of these EC2 Compute Units. We use several benchmarks and tests to manage the consistency and predictability of the performance from an EC2 Compute Unit. One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. This is also the equivalent to an early-2006 1.7 GHz Xeon processor referenced in our original documentation. Over time, we may add or substitute measures that go into the definition of an EC2 Compute Unit, if we find metrics that will give you a clearer picture of compute capacity.

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 |

Responding to the Forum Thread for the sake of completeness. Amazon has stopped using the the ECU - Elastic Compute Units and moved on to a vCPU based measure. So ignoring the ECU you pretty much can start comparing the EC2 Instances' sizes as CPU (Clock Speed), number of CPUs, RAM, storage etc.

Every instance families' instance configurations are published as number of vCPU and what is the physical processor. Detailed info and screenshot obstained from here http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#instance-type-matrix