m7i.16xlarge

Analysis

The m7i.16xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m7i series with 64 vCPUs and 256 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.16xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $2.61/hour, 19% less ($449 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m7i-flex.16xlarge at $3.06, the m7gd.16xlarge at $3.42 and the m7a.16xlarge at $3.71.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $1,398 a month per instance: $3.23/hour against $5.14/hour, a 59% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $2.13/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $1.46/hour, 55% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $6.17/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $3.23/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $2,355 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.16xlarge on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) ($112 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer m8i.16xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) is 5.0% dearer at $3.39/hour.