m8idn.12xlarge

Analysis

The m8idn.12xlarge is a general purpose instance in the m8idn series with 48 vCPUs and 192 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.12xlarge on AWS Graviton4 costs $2.15/hour, 53% less ($1,773 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 $959 a month per instance: $4.58/hour against $5.90/hour, a 29% spread. It is not offered in Canada Central, São Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, so plan around that if you need a presence there.

Per vCPU it is one of the dearer general purpose types: 93% of the 354 current types in the family cost less than its $0.0955 per vCPU-hour. The premium mostly pays for the local NVMe disk. On demand it is $4.58/hour in US East (N. Virginia), or $3,345 for a 730-hour month.

Looking beyond its own line, 31 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.