Their comparison sizes for instances versus physical machines is laughable. For a 12 core physical machine with 64GB of RAM they list the r3.2xlarge instance si

Their comparison sizes for instances versus physical machines is laughable. For a 12 core physical machine with 64GB of RAM they list the r3.2xlarge instance size as unit-for-unit comparable (10 instances versus 10 machines I had configured). Yeah... no. 8 vCPUs are nowhere near as fast as a pair of 6 core Xeons. My rule of thumb in AWS is that you get about half of what they say you do: so an 8 vCPU instance has about as much power as a 4 core physical server. And don't even get me started on what they have for hardware costs. I think they must have pulled list price from Dell or something. I can get prices about 2/3 to 1/2 of what they're listing from my VAR.