m5n.16xlarge

Analysis

The m5n.16xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m5n series with 64 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Platinum 8259 (Cascade Lake) (up to 3.1 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m5a.16xlarge on AMD EPYC 7571 costs $2.75/hour, 28% less ($771 a month). The other variants are the m5.16xlarge at $3.07, the m5ad.16xlarge at $3.30 and the m5d.16xlarge at $3.62.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $794 a month per instance: $3.81/hour against $4.90/hour, a 29% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Mumbai and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $3.81/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $2,780 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 59th percentile per vCPU ($0.0595 per vCPU-hour) and the 59th percentile per GiB ($0.0149 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 21 of 35 current types with 64 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.16xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $2.46/hour.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $2.40/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 63% of the time; three years brings it to $1.47/hour, 61% below on demand. Windows Server roughly adds 77% to the bill at $6.75/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.