m7i.4xlarge

Analysis

The m7i.4xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m7i series with 16 vCPUs and 64 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.4xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $0.6528/hour, 19% less ($112 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m7i-flex.4xlarge at $0.7661, the m7gd.4xlarge at $0.8543 and the m7a.4xlarge at $0.9274.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $350 a month per instance: $0.8064/hour against $1.29/hour, a 59% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $0.5334/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $0.3658/hour, 55% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $1.54/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $0.8064/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $589 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.4xlarge on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) ($28.03 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer m8i.4xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) is 5.0% dearer at $0.8467/hour.