m7i.24xlarge

Analysis

The m7i.24xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m7i series with 96 vCPUs and 384 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.

It is the cheapest of the 2 processor variants AWS sells at this size and generation. The m7a.24xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R14 costs 15% more, and no others also sit above it.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $2,097 a month per instance: $4.84/hour against $7.71/hour, a 59% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $3.20/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $2.19/hour, 55% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $9.25/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $4.84/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $3,532 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.24xlarge on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) ($168 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer m8i.24xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) is 5.0% dearer at $5.08/hour.