The c7i.metal-48xl pairs 192 vCPU with 384 GiB of RAM, the 2.00 GiB-per-vCPU ratio that marks a compute-optimized instance. In the name, "c" stands for compute, "7" is the generation, "i" marks Intel processors and "metal-48xl" is the size within the c7i family. It runs on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) at 3.2 GHz, and AWS introduced it in October 2023. AWS has since shipped c8i and c9g; c8i.metal-48xl is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 4,532,845 CoreMark/s against this instance's 4,179,668 — roughly 8% more throughput for the same vCPU count. Spot's node ladder tops out below this size, so c7i.metal-48xl becomes 12 × ch.vs1.2xlarge (192 vCPU, 384 GiB combined), about 94% below the US East (N. Virginia) on-demand rate. Spot delivers compute as managed Kubernetes, so a node pool of that size is the native shape of the answer rather than a workaround — provided the workload scales horizontally.
Match qualityVirtualised, not bare metal
c7i.metal-48xl is a full physical server — no virtualisation layer in the way, direct access to the hardware, and a socket count that licensing can verify.
Rackspace Spot no longer sells bare metal; everything in the catalog is a virtual machine. You get the same cores and memory (12 × ch.vs1.2xlarge, 192 vCPU, 384 GiB), but not the dedicated hardware. If you picked c7i.metal-48xl because you needed the real machine — nested virtualisation, per-socket licensing, low-level profiling — this is not a replacement at any price. If you picked it because it is the biggest c7i, it is the same compute for a lot less.
Runs as a fleetNo single Spot node has 192 vCPU; the largest comparable one has 16. So this runs as 12 nodes. That works if your workload already spreads across machines, and doesn't if one process needs all the cores together.
