c7a.24xlarge

Analysis

The c7a.24xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c7a series with 96 vCPUs and 192 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.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 34% more than the c6a.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 ($916 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer c8a.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R45 is 5.0% dearer at $5.17/hour.

Within the same generation and size, the c7i.24xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) costs $4.28/hour, 13% less ($469 a month).

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $931 a month per instance: $4.93/hour against $6.20/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 $4.93/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $3,597 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).

Looking beyond its own line, 12 of 22 current types with 96 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the c5a.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R32 at $3.70/hour.