I only have a general comment about this, but that kind of performance is almost not worth thinking about in most cases. Just like NBA players need to be "tall enough", your cloud needs to be "fast enough", and AWS is just that.
Having said that, nothing beats getting real hardware in terms of performance/$. I used to work for a company that exclusively worked on SoftLayer's hardware servers. These were $500+/month each, but they were fast. The point is that if you can devote a dual octocore machine to what you are doing, and are willing to pass up on the SAN, flexible networking, etc. then you get a very fast box. If what you are doing requires lots of very fast hardware, then yea AWS or anything like it is not really for you. But if you are like most people, your AWS bill is not going to break the bank and you can just spend one less billable hour figuring out why the server is slow, and just double its size.
Having said that, nothing beats getting real hardware in terms of performance/$. I used to work for a company that exclusively worked on SoftLayer's hardware servers. These were $500+/month each, but they were fast. The point is that if you can devote a dual octocore machine to what you are doing, and are willing to pass up on the SAN, flexible networking, etc. then you get a very fast box. If what you are doing requires lots of very fast hardware, then yea AWS or anything like it is not really for you. But if you are like most people, your AWS bill is not going to break the bank and you can just spend one less billable hour figuring out why the server is slow, and just double its size.