c8i.12xlarge

Analysis

The c8i.12xlarge is a compute optimized instance in the c8i series with 48 vCPUs and 96 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) (up to 3.9 GHz), which makes it compute-heavy at 2 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the c8g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $1.91/hour, 15% less ($244 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the c8i-flex.12xlarge at $2.14, the c8gd.12xlarge at $2.35 and the c8a.12xlarge at $2.59.

Running it in Mumbai instead of São Paulo saves $889 a month per instance: $2.25/hour against $3.47/hour, a 54% spread.

Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $4.46/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $2.25/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,642 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for compute optimized types at the 47th percentile per vCPU ($0.0469 per vCPU-hour) and the 50th percentile per GiB ($0.0234 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 15 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.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the c7i.12xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) ($78.14 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.