Where have you seen that you have a dedicated CPU core on Linode?
In the VPS market it's nothing unusual to oversell CPU, you can't only have 24 VM on a single server, that doesn't work financially (except if they count threads from hyper-threading as a core but that's not dedicated).
In the VPS market it's nothing unusual to oversell CPU, you can't only have 24 VM on a single server, that doesn't work financially (except if they count threads from hyper-threading as a core but that's not dedicated).