AWS m7g.metalvsAWS m7gd.12xlarge

m7g.metal pairs 64 vCPUs with 256GB of RAM at $2.6112/hr On-Demand (about $1880/mo at 24×7). m7gd.12xlarge pairs 48 vCPUs with 192GB at $2.5628/hr (~$1845/mo). m7gd.12xlarge is 2% cheaper per hour than m7g.metal ($0.0484/hr gap).

Both are generation-7 general-purpose instances, but they run on different silicon: **m7g.metal** is AWS Graviton (ARM64), **m7gd.12xlarge** is AWS Graviton (ARM64). 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 roughly tied on single-thread performance per dollar (1158 vs 1176 Sysbench 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 (192841 vs 144356) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when m7g.metal drops to $0.6229/hr and m7gd.12xlarge drops to $0.6661/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick m7g.metal when your workload is closer to general-purpose (balanced general-purpose workloads with a 1:4 vCPU-to-memory ratio). Pick m7gd.12xlarge 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.