AWS r4.4xlargevsAWS r4.8xlarge

r4.4xlarge pairs 16 vCPUs with 122GB of RAM at $1.0640/hr On-Demand (about $766/mo at 24×7). r4.8xlarge pairs 32 vCPUs with 244GB at $2.1280/hr (~$1532/mo). r4.4xlarge is 100% cheaper per hour than r4.8xlarge ($1.0640/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **r4 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: r4.4xlarge gives you 16 vCPUs and 122GB of RAM, r4.8xlarge gives you 32 vCPUs and 244GB. 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 r4.4xlarge delivers ~101% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (970 vs 483 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 (12671 vs 25407) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when r4.4xlarge drops to $0.3905/hr and r4.8xlarge drops to $0.6680/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick r4.4xlarge when your workload is closer to memory-optimized (memory-bound work — in-memory databases, real-time analytics, large caches). Pick r4.8xlarge when it's closer to memory-optimized (memory-bound work — in-memory databases, real-time analytics, large caches). 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.