Softlayer is a lot more expensive than most hosts these days. They're closer to being in Rackspace territory now.

You can get a dual E5-2609 with 32gb of ram + bandwidth from a good host like WebNX for $369 / month.

And if you wanted to spend $1k per month, you can get a dual e5-2687W (16 cores @ 3.1ghz) with 128gb ram; with a 4x SAS RAID 10, plus a 120gb ssd drive, plus a 2tb backup freebie, plus 100mbps unmetered bandwidth (30tb). That literally blows the doors off Softlayer.