AWS i7ie.metal-24xlvsAWS i7ie.xlarge

i7ie.metal-24xl pairs 96 vCPUs with 768GB of RAM at $12.4752/hr On-Demand (about $8982/mo at 24×7). i7ie.xlarge pairs 4 vCPUs with 32GB at $0.5198/hr (~$374/mo). i7ie.xlarge is 96% cheaper per hour than i7ie.metal-24xl ($11.9554/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **i7ie 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: i7ie.metal-24xl gives you 96 vCPUs and 768GB of RAM, i7ie.xlarge gives you 4 vCPUs and 32GB. 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 i7ie.xlarge delivers ~1939% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (279 vs 5689 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 (137115 vs 6001) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when i7ie.metal-24xl drops to $2.1141/hr and i7ie.xlarge drops to $0.1220/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick i7ie.metal-24xl when your workload is closer to storage-optimized (NVMe SSD) (I/O-bound work needing low-latency NVMe local storage — NoSQL, search). Pick i7ie.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.