m8a.4xlargeAWS Pricing, Specs & Benchmarks

The m8a family is a generation-8 general-purpose line running on AMD EPYC (x86_64) — typically ~10% cheaper than the Intel sibling at comparable single-thread performance. m8a.4xlarge provides 16 vCPUs and 64GB of RAM (a 1:4 vCPU-to-memory ratio), priced at $0.9738/hr On-Demand — about $701.11 per month at 24×7 utilization. In Sysbench CPU benchmarks it scores 5554 single-core and 88002 multi-core.

General-purpose instances are sized for application servers, mid-sized databases, caching fleets, and any workload where you want a balanced 1:4 vCPU-to-memory ratio without burstable credit accounting. If your workload doesn't match that profile — for example, if you're running a memory-bound app on a compute-optimized instance, or a CPU-pegged batch job on a burstable t-series — you'll likely pay for capacity you can't use or run into bottlenecks you didn't anticipate. The pages for sibling families (linked further down) cover those alternatives in detail.

In the AWS instance-naming convention, the digit after the series letter is the generation — higher is newer. This appears to be one of AWS's newer generations in the series, so for most fresh workloads it's a reasonable default within its category.

Pricing varies by region (sometimes meaningfully — the gap between the cheapest and most expensive AWS region for the same SKU is often 15–30%). The regional pricing table further down shows where m8a.4xlarge is cheapest today, both On-Demand and Spot. Spot pricing for m8a.4xlarge is currently $0.3806/hr — roughly 61% off On-Demand — which makes the instance viable for fault-tolerant batch jobs, CI fleets, and any workload that can tolerate interruption with short notice.