m5.24xlarge

Analysis

The m5.24xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5 series with 96 vCPUs and 384 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.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $4.13/hour, 10% less ($350 a month). The other variants are the m5ad.24xlarge at $4.94, the m5d.24xlarge at $5.42 and the m5n.24xlarge at $5.71.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $1,997 a month per instance: $4.61/hour against $7.34/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $4.61/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $3,364 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 $2.90/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $1.99/hour, 57% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $9.02/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

Looking beyond its own line, 4 of 28 current types with 96 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the hpc6a.48xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 at $2.88/hour.