m7i.12xlarge

Analysis

The m7i.12xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m7i series with 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) (up to 3.2 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, 19% less ($336 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m7i-flex.12xlarge at $2.30, the m7gd.12xlarge at $2.56 and the m7a.12xlarge at $2.78.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $1,049 a month per instance: $2.42/hour against $3.86/hour, a 59% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.60/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $1.10/hour, 55% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $4.63/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $2.42/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,766 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 39th percentile per vCPU ($0.0504 per vCPU-hour) and the 39th percentile per GiB ($0.0126 per GiB-hour).

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the m6i.12xlarge on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) ($84.10 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer m8i.12xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) is 5.0% dearer at $2.54/hour.