AWS i8g.largevsAWS i8g.metal-24xl

i8g.large pairs 2 vCPUs with 16GB of RAM at $0.1716/hr On-Demand (about $124/mo at 24×7). i8g.metal-24xl pairs 96 vCPUs with 768GB at $8.2368/hr (~$5930/mo). i8g.large is 4700% cheaper per hour than i8g.metal-24xl ($8.0652/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **i8g family**, the only thing that changes between them is sizing — same silicon, same architecture (AWS Graviton (ARM64)), same burstable/sustained behavior. The choice is purely about how much capacity you actually need: i8g.large gives you 2 vCPUs and 16GB of RAM, i8g.metal-24xl gives you 96 vCPUs and 768GB. 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 i8g.large delivers ~4700% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (19441 vs 405 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 (6507 vs 319725) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when i8g.large drops to $0.0510/hr and i8g.metal-24xl drops to $1.0346/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick i8g.large when your workload is closer to storage-optimized (NVMe SSD) (I/O-bound work needing low-latency NVMe local storage — NoSQL, search). Pick i8g.metal-24xl 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.