c7i.24xlarge

Analysis

The c7i.24xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c7i series with 96 vCPUs and 192 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) (up to 3.2 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

It is the cheapest of the 2 processor variants AWS sells at this size and generation. The c7a.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R14 costs 15% more, and no others also sit above it.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $1,692 a month per instance: $4.28/hour against $6.60/hour, a 54% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $2.83/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $1.89/hour, 56% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $8.70/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $4.28/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $3,127 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for compute optimized types at the 40th percentile per vCPU ($0.0446 per vCPU-hour) and the 44th percentile per GiB ($0.0223 per GiB-hour).

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the c6i.24xlarge on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) ($149 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer c8i.24xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) is 5.0% dearer at $4.50/hour.