AWS c5.largevsAWS c5d.large

c5.large pairs 2 vCPUs with 4GB of RAM at $0.0850/hr On-Demand (about $61/mo at 24×7). c5d.large pairs 2 vCPUs with 4GB at $0.0960/hr (~$69/mo). c5.large is 13% cheaper per hour than c5d.large ($0.0110/hr gap).

Both are generation-5 compute-optimized instances, but they run on different silicon: **c5.large** is Intel Xeon (x86_64), **c5d.large** is Intel Xeon (x86_64). AMD variants (suffix `a`) are typically 10% cheaper than Intel siblings at comparable single-thread performance. Graviton variants (suffix `g`) are usually 20–40% cheaper but require ARM64-compatible binaries — most modern Linux stacks are fine, but verify any compiled extensions, native modules, or third-party binaries before migrating. Same vCPU/RAM ratio, same network performance class, different processor.

On raw price-per-performance, the two are c5.large delivers ~10% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (14176 vs 12917 points per $1/hr). That's the cleanest signal we have for "which one runs your workload faster per dollar," but it only matters if your workload is single-thread-bound; for parallel workloads the multi-core scores (1803 vs 1860) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when c5.large drops to $0.0318/hr and c5d.large drops to $0.0343/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick c5.large when your workload is closer to compute-optimized (CPU-bound work — batch processing, web servers under sustained load, game servers). Pick c5d.large when it's closer to compute-optimized (CPU-bound work — batch processing, web servers under sustained load, game servers). When neither side is obviously right, the cheaper hourly rate usually wins for fault-tolerant batch workloads, while the higher single-core score usually wins for latency-sensitive web traffic. The regional pricing tables linked from each instance page below show where each is currently cheapest — sometimes a >20% regional gap flips the comparison entirely.