After Round 12, we had to find a new physical hardware environment. ServerCentral [1] stepped up and provided some (older) physical hardware for the project. However, the new hardware doesn't match the performance of previous rounds.
The physical hardware for each round has been [2]:
* Rounds 1 through 8: i7-2600K workstations
* Round 9 through 12: 2x Xeon E5-2660v2
* Round 13: 4x Xeon E7-4850
[1] https://www.servercentral.com/
[2] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=environment
They changed the test rig from an i7-2600K to a Dual Xeon ES-2660v2. Those 4 cores at 3.4ghz destroy the 20 cores at 2.2ghz.
Cloud performance in comparison is terrible. That i7 hits 290k fortunes compared to the cloud VM hitting 30k. You need ~$1500 of VM a month ($0.23 / hour / 30 days / 9) to match a desktop computer from 2011.