Concerned about cloud costs? Have you tried using newer virtual machines?

Better, faster, and more efficient chips are driving down cloud operating costs and pushing prices lower, according to research from IT infrastructure standards and advisory group, the Uptime Institute. With each generation of processor family, cloud pricing has trended downward with one notable exception, Owen Rogers, …

[RichardBarrell]

How fast the newer VMs run

I would hope the numbers would get a little better again if you take performance into account - hopefully the newer VM flavours are able to service more clients from a given number of instances?