Testing methodology and interpretation of the results was pretty sloppy: Only one test run per platform for single threaded performance, comparisons are very round numbers that exaggerate differences.
If you look into the test results, you'll see that I/O differences seem to be responsible for the majority of the differences in test results between the dedicated box and the ec2 instances. CPU does have an impact though, with the dedicated box showing ~2.5x the CPU performance of an amazon instance.
In the end though its the same old story, if you compare one EC2 instance to one dedicated server, the dedicated server is a better by most measures: RAM, CPU, I/O, bandwidth...
If you look into the test results, you'll see that I/O differences seem to be responsible for the majority of the differences in test results between the dedicated box and the ec2 instances. CPU does have an impact though, with the dedicated box showing ~2.5x the CPU performance of an amazon instance.
In the end though its the same old story, if you compare one EC2 instance to one dedicated server, the dedicated server is a better by most measures: RAM, CPU, I/O, bandwidth...