m8a.12xlarge

Analysis

The m8a.12xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8a series with 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB of memory on AMD EPYC 9R45 (up to Up to 4.5 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m8g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $2.15/hour, 26% less ($560 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.12xlarge at $2.41, the m8i.12xlarge at $2.54 and the m8gd.12xlarge at $2.77.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $622 a month per instance: $2.92/hour against $3.77/hour, a 29% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Singapore and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

On demand it costs $2.92/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $2,133 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 62nd percentile per vCPU ($0.0609 per vCPU-hour) and the 62nd percentile per GiB ($0.0152 per GiB-hour).

Looking beyond its own line, 20 of 36 current types with 48 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.12xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $1.85/hour.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the m7a.12xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R14 ($102 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.