c5.12xlarge

Analysis

The c5.12xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c5 series with 48 vCPUs and 96 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8275L (up to 3.4 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the c5a.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R32 costs $1.85/hour, 9.4% less ($140 a month). The other variants are the c5ad.12xlarge at $2.06 and the c5d.12xlarge at $2.30.

At $2.04/hour on demand in US East (N. Virginia), about $1,489 a month, the c5.12xlarge is one of the cheaper ways to buy compute optimized capacity: only 24% of the 291 current compute optimized types cost less per vCPU-hour than its $0.0425.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $806 a month per instance: $2.04/hour against $3.14/hour, a 54% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.28/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.8550/hour, 58% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $4.25/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

Looking beyond its own line, 7 of 30 current types with 48 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the c6g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $1.63/hour.