AWS i3.2xlargevsAWS i3.xlarge

i3.2xlarge pairs 8 vCPUs with 61GB of RAM at $0.6240/hr On-Demand (about $449/mo at 24×7). i3.xlarge pairs 4 vCPUs with 30.5GB at $0.3120/hr (~$225/mo). i3.xlarge is 50% cheaper per hour than i3.2xlarge ($0.3120/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **i3 family**, the only thing that changes between them is sizing — same silicon, same architecture (Intel Xeon (x86_64)), same burstable/sustained behavior. The choice is purely about how much capacity you actually need: i3.2xlarge gives you 8 vCPUs and 61GB of RAM, i3.xlarge gives you 4 vCPUs and 30.5GB. AWS scales pricing close to linearly within a family, so picking the right size is mostly about right-sizing your workload, not getting a better deal per vCPU.

On raw price-per-performance, the two are i3.xlarge delivers ~100% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (1449 vs 2901 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 (5337 vs 2643) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when i3.2xlarge drops to $0.3911/hr and i3.xlarge drops to $0.1456/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick i3.2xlarge when your workload is closer to storage-optimized (NVMe SSD) (I/O-bound work needing low-latency NVMe local storage — NoSQL, search). Pick i3.xlarge when it's closer to storage-optimized (NVMe SSD) (I/O-bound work needing low-latency NVMe local storage — NoSQL, search). 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.