m8i.2xlarge

Analysis

The m8i.2xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8i series with 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) (up to 3.9 GHz), which makes it balanced at 4 GiB of memory per vCPU.

Within the same generation and size, the m8g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.3590/hour, 15% less ($46.95 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.2xlarge at $0.4022, the m8gd.2xlarge at $0.4613 and the m8a.2xlarge at $0.4869.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $183 a month per instance: $0.4234/hour against $0.6747/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $0.4234/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $309 a month if left running, which puts it mid-table for general purpose types at the 44th percentile per vCPU ($0.0529 per vCPU-hour) and the 44th percentile per GiB ($0.0132 per GiB-hour).

Compared with the previous generation, it costs 5.0% more than the m7i.2xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) ($14.72 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.

Looking beyond its own line, 18 of 42 current types with 8 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.2xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.2688/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.