I guess the bigger point I was trying to make is that if you are running on a small-ram VPS, you almost certainly will hit performance problems due to disk I/O

I guess the bigger point I was trying to make is that if you are running on a small-ram VPS, you almost certainly will hit performance problems due to disk I/O before you will hit performance problems due to CPU usage, so being able to compare CPU is of, ah, limited utility.