c7a.12xlarge

Analysis

The c7a.12xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c7a series with 48 vCPUs and 96 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 9R14 (up to Up to 3.7 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the c7g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $1.74/hour, 29% less ($528 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the c7i-flex.12xlarge at $2.03, the c7i.12xlarge at $2.14 and the c7gd.12xlarge at $2.18.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 34% more than the c6a.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 ($458 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer c8a.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R45 is 5.0% dearer at $2.59/hour.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $465 a month per instance: $2.46/hour against $3.10/hour, a 26% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, Mumbai and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $2.46/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,798 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for compute optimized types at the 62nd percentile per vCPU ($0.0513 per vCPU-hour) and the 65th percentile per GiB ($0.0257 per GiB-hour).