General purpose EC2 instances
AWS groups 354 current EC2 instance types into the general purpose family, across 42 series. The median Linux on-demand price in US East is $0.0577 per vCPU-hour, and 28% of these types run on Arm-based Graviton processors.
By median price per vCPU, the cheapest series is t8i (Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids), $0.00936 per vCPU-hour) and the dearest is m8ine (Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids), $0.1044). Unit price is not everything: newer processors do more work per vCPU, and some series add local NVMe storage or faster networking. The table lists every current series with its size count, unit price and memory per vCPU, so you can shortlist by shape first and price second.
Arm-based Graviton types have a median of $0.0489 per vCPU-hour against $0.0580 for x86, so Graviton is 16% cheaper per vCPU if your software runs on arm64. Among x86 types, AMD EPYC instances sit at a median of $0.0515 per vCPU-hour and Intel Xeon at $0.0595. Prices span from the t4g.nano (2 vCPUs, 0.5 GiB) at $0.00420/hour, about $3.07 a month, to the m8idn.96xlarge (384 vCPUs, 1536 GiB) at $36.66/hour, about $26,762 a month.
| Series | Processor | Sizes | $/vCPU-h | GiB/vCPU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| t8i | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 4 | $0.00936 | 0.8 |
| t4g | AWS Graviton2 Processor | 7 | $0.0168 | 2.0 |
| t3a | AMD EPYC 7571 | 7 | $0.0188 | 2.0 |
| t3 | Intel Skylake E5 2686 v5 | 7 | $0.0208 | 2.0 |
| t2 | Intel Xeon Family | 7 | $0.0232 | 2.0 |
| m6g | AWS Graviton2 Processor | 8 | $0.0385 | 4.0 |
| m7g | AWS Graviton3 Processor | 8 | $0.0408 | 4.0 |
| hpc8a | AMD EPYC 9R45 Processor | 1 | $0.0413 | 4.0 |
| m5a | AMD EPYC 7571 | 8 | $0.0430 | 4.0 |
| m6a | AMD EPYC 7R13 Processor | 10 | $0.0432 | 4.0 |
| m8g | AWS Graviton4 Processor | 10 | $0.0449 | 4.0 |
| m6gd | AWS Graviton2 Processor | 8 | $0.0452 | 4.0 |
| m7i-flex | Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) | 7 | $0.0479 | 4.0 |
| m6i | Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) | 9 | $0.0480 | 4.0 |
| m5 | Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 | 8 | $0.0480 | 4.0 |
| m9g | AWS Graviton5 Processor | 10 | $0.0489 | 4.0 |
| m4 | Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) | 6 | $0.0500 | 4.0 |
| m8i-flex | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 7 | $0.0503 | 4.0 |
| m7i | Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) | 9 | $0.0504 | 4.0 |
| m5ad | AMD EPYC 7571 | 8 | $0.0515 | 4.0 |
| m8i | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 11 | $0.0529 | 4.0 |
| m7gd | AWS Graviton3 Processor | 8 | $0.0534 | 4.0 |
| m5d | Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 | 8 | $0.0565 | 4.0 |
| m8gd | AWS Graviton4 Processor | 10 | $0.0577 | 4.0 |
| m7a | AMD EPYC 9R14 Processor | 11 | $0.0580 | 4.0 |
| m6id | Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) | 9 | $0.0593 | 4.0 |
| m5n | Intel Xeon Platinum 8259 (Cascade Lake) | 8 | $0.0595 | 4.0 |
| m8a | AMD EPYC 9R45 Processor | 10 | $0.0609 | 4.0 |
| m9gd | AWS Graviton5 Processor | 10 | $0.0629 | 4.0 |
| m8id | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 11 | $0.0653 | 4.0 |
| m5dn | Intel Xeon Platinum 8259 (Cascade Lake) | 8 | $0.0680 | 4.0 |
| m6in | Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) | 9 | $0.0696 | 4.0 |
| m8gb | AWS Graviton4 Processor | 10 | $0.0727 | 4.0 |
| m8gn | AWS Graviton4 Processor | 10 | $0.0727 | 4.0 |
| m6idn | Intel Xeon 8375C (Ice Lake) | 9 | $0.0796 | 4.0 |
| m5zn | Intel Xeon Platinum 8252 | 6 | $0.0826 | 4.0 |
| m8in | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 11 | $0.0835 | 4.0 |
| m8ib | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 11 | $0.0835 | 4.0 |
| m8idn | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 11 | $0.0955 | 4.0 |
| m8idb | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 11 | $0.0955 | 4.0 |
| m8azn | AMD EPYC 9575F | 7 | $0.1032 | 4.0 |
| m8ine | Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) | 6 | $0.1044 | 4.0 |