c7a.48xlarge

Analysis

The c7a.48xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c7a series with 192 vCPUs and 384 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.48xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 ($1,832 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer c8a.48xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R45 is 5.0% dearer at $10.35/hour.

Within the same generation and size, the c7i.48xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) costs $8.57/hour, 13% less ($938 a month).

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $1,861 a month per instance: $9.85/hour against $12.40/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 $9.85/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $7,193 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, 6 of 14 current types with 192 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the c8g.48xlarge on AWS Graviton4 at $7.66/hour.