Not just that, but when you look at the higher-end instances, CloudLayer's pricing becomes even more attractive. At $300, you get 8GB of RAM and 8 cores. Considering that Amazon's EBS has I/O usage charges, this is cheaper than Amazon's Large instance (7.5GB RAM and 2 cores with 2 compute units per core) with any I/O usage.

EDIT: SoftLayer is also saying that their base CPU is 2.0GHz rather than the 1.2GHz that Amazon's compute units are based off of.