Comment by oceanplexian

If you know anything about hardware and look at the typical instances AWS is serving up (other than the ludicrously expensive ones) it's Skylake and older.

I think people have a warped perception of performance, if only because the cloud providers are serving up a shared VM on equipment I'd practically class as vintage computing. You could throw some of the same parts together from eBay and buy the whole system with less than a few months worth of the hourly on-demand cost.