m7a.12xlarge

Analysis

The m7a.12xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m7a series with 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 9R14 (up to Up to 3.7 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m7g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $1.96/hour, 30% less ($601 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m7i-flex.12xlarge at $2.30, the m7i.12xlarge at $2.42 and the m7gd.12xlarge at $2.56.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 34% more than the m6a.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 7R13 ($517 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer m8a.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R45 is 5.0% dearer at $2.92/hour.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $592 a month per instance: $2.78/hour against $3.59/hour, a 29% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, Mumbai and Singapore, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $2.78/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $2,031 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 55th percentile per vCPU ($0.0580 per vCPU-hour) and the 55th percentile per GiB ($0.0145 per GiB-hour).