AWS m6gd.mediumvsAWS m6gd.metal

m6gd.medium pairs 1 vCPUs with 4GB of RAM at $0.0452/hr On-Demand (about $33/mo at 24×7). m6gd.metal pairs 64 vCPUs with 256GB at $2.8928/hr (~$2083/mo). m6gd.medium is 6300% cheaper per hour than m6gd.metal ($2.8476/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **m6gd 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: m6gd.medium gives you 1 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM, m6gd.metal gives you 64 vCPUs and 256GB. 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 m6gd.medium delivers ~5800% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (57345 vs 972 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 (2530 vs 179415) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when m6gd.medium drops to $0.0143/hr and m6gd.metal drops to $0.5695/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick m6gd.medium when your workload is closer to general-purpose (balanced general-purpose workloads with a 1:4 vCPU-to-memory ratio). Pick m6gd.metal when it's closer to general-purpose (balanced general-purpose workloads with a 1:4 vCPU-to-memory ratio). 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.