m8a.48xlarge

Analysis

The m8a.48xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8a series with 192 vCPUs and 768 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.48xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $8.62/hour, 26% less ($2,240 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i.48xlarge at $10.16, the m8gd.48xlarge at $11.07 and the m8id.48xlarge at $12.53.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $2,488 a month per instance: $11.69/hour against $15.09/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 $11.69/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $8,530 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, 9 of 18 current types with 192 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the hpc7a.96xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R14 at $7.20/hour.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the m7a.48xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R14 ($406 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.