m8i.xlarge

Analysis

The m8i.xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8i series with 4 vCPUs and 16 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.xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $0.1795/hour, 15% less ($23.48 a month), though switching means rebuilding software for arm64. The other variants are the m8i-flex.xlarge at $0.2011, the m8gd.xlarge at $0.2306 and the m8a.xlarge at $0.2434.

Running it in N. Virginia instead of São Paulo saves $91.75 a month per instance: $0.2117/hour against $0.3374/hour, a 59% spread.

On demand it costs $0.2117/hour in US East (N. Virginia), $155 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.xlarge on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) ($7.36 more a month per instance), in exchange for the newer processor.

Looking beyond its own line, 18 of 42 current types with 4 vCPUs and similar memory are cheaper. The cheapest of those is the t4g.xlarge on AWS Graviton2 at $0.1344/hour. It is burstable, so it only suits workloads that do not run the CPU flat out.