AWS t3.xlargevsAWS t3a.xlarge

t3.xlarge pairs 4 vCPUs with 16GB of RAM at $0.1664/hr On-Demand (about $120/mo at 24×7). t3a.xlarge pairs 4 vCPUs with 16GB at $0.1504/hr (~$108/mo). t3a.xlarge is 10% cheaper per hour than t3.xlarge ($0.0160/hr gap).

Both are generation-3 burstable general-purpose instances, but they run on different silicon: **t3.xlarge** is Intel Xeon (x86_64), **t3a.xlarge** is AMD EPYC (x86_64). 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 t3a.xlarge delivers ~32% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (6136 vs 8078 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 (3116 vs 2618) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when t3.xlarge drops to $0.0521/hr and t3a.xlarge drops to $0.0574/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick t3.xlarge when your workload is closer to burstable general-purpose (bursty traffic — web apps, dev/test boxes, CI runners, small databases). Pick t3a.xlarge when it's closer to burstable general-purpose (bursty traffic — web apps, dev/test boxes, CI runners, small databases). 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.