m5.12xlarge

Analysis

The m5.12xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5 series with 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 (up to 3.1 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m5a.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $2.06/hour, 10% less ($175 a month). The other variants are the m5ad.12xlarge at $2.47, the m5d.12xlarge at $2.71 and the m5n.12xlarge at $2.86.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $999 a month per instance: $2.30/hour against $3.67/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $2.30/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,682 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 27th percentile per vCPU ($0.0480 per vCPU-hour) and the 25th percentile per GiB ($0.0120 per GiB-hour).

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.45/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $0.9950/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $4.51/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

Looking beyond its own line, 7 of 36 current types with 48 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $1.85/hour.