The parent claims that though aws uses better hardware, they bill in vcpus whose benchmarks are from a few years ago, so that they can sell more vcpu units per performant physical cpu. This does not contradict your claim that aws buys better hardware.
> Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (SELECT, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor. See below for a more detailed description of how machine utilization charges are calculated.
SimpleDB is over 15 years old. I guess it's the only service still using "normalized" pricing. Newer services like RDS tell you exactly which processor you're getting and how many cores.
