m8a.4xlarge

Analysis

The m8a.4xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8a series with 16 vCPUs and 64 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.4xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.7181/hour, 26% less ($187 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.4xlarge at $0.8044, the m8i.4xlarge at $0.8467 and the m8gd.4xlarge at $0.9226.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of Tokyo saves $207 a month per instance: $0.9738/hour against $1.26/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 $0.9738/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $711 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, 22 of 37 current types with 16 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the m6g.4xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.6160/hour.

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the m7a.4xlarge on AMD EPYC 9R14 ($33.87 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.