I run BareMetalSavings.com[0], a toy for ballpark-estimating bare-metal/cloud savings, and the things you can do with just a few servers today are pretty crazy.
What I wanted to get at is that the pure core count can be misleading if you care about power consumption. If you don't and just look at performance, the current CPU generations are monsters. But if you care about performance/Watt, the improvement isn't that large. The Zen1 CPU I was talking about had a TDP of 180 W. So you get 6x as many cores, but the power consumption increases by 2.7x.
Note that this doesn't intend to be used for accounting, but for estimating, and it's good at that. If anything, it's more favorable to the cloud (e.g, no egress costs).
If you're on the cloud right now and BMS shows you can save a lot of money, that's a good indicator to carefully research the subject.