But all you are ever getting with vps offerings is a description of the number of cpus and amount of ram and suchlike. I haven't seen vps offerings that say "x" chips yield "y" performance. Granted it is sort of implied that the hardware meets certain expectations but there isn't any guarantee. I was just now reading the TOS for AWS just to check and so far as I can tell they aren't guaranteeing any kind of specific performance.