Does anyone know why the big cloud vendors don’t seem to have any offerings that can beat a regular consumer machine in single thread performance? Surely there must be a market for it?
It's highly likely there's a market for it, however I'm doubtful they'd be willing to spec lower-density, higher-performance machines for the few people who would actually take advantage of them. Considering high core count CPUs are becoming the new norm, re-writing or finding software that can take advantage of multiple cores/threads is certainly the way to for maximum performance (where possible, of course)
I half remember an article about stock trading companies overclocking servers and running them single threaded at max clock speed. The aim was shaving a few more microseconds from their response time. They accepted the reduced lifetime of the hardware, just replaced it sooner. I got the impression it was a niche market though.