m7i.8xlarge

Analysis

The m7i.8xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m7i series with 32 vCPUs and 128 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.8xlarge on AWS Graviton3 costs $1.31/hour, 19% less ($224 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m7i-flex.8xlarge at $1.53, the m7gd.8xlarge at $1.71 and the m7a.8xlarge at $1.85.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $699 a month per instance: $1.61/hour against $2.57/hour, a 59% spread.

Reserving it for a year with no upfront payment cuts the Linux rate to $1.07/hour, which beats on demand once it runs more than 66% of the time; three years brings it to $0.7316/hour, 55% below on demand. Windows Server roughly doubles the bill at $3.08/hour, because the licence is charged per vCPU.

On demand it costs $1.61/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $1,177 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.8xlarge on Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) ($56.06 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor. The newer m8i.8xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) is 5.0% dearer at $1.69/hour.