The m8i.12xlarge pairs 48 vCPU with 192 GiB of RAM, the 4.00 GiB-per-vCPU ratio that marks a general-purpose instance. In the name, "m" is the general-purpose line, "8" is the generation, "i" marks Intel processors and "12xlarge" is the size within the m8i family. It runs on Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) at 3.9 GHz, and AWS introduced it in August 2025. AWS has since shipped m9g; m9g.12xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 1,757,705 CoreMark/s against this instance's 1,109,527 — roughly 58% more throughput for the same vCPU count. Spot's node ladder tops out below this size, so m8i.12xlarge becomes 3 × gp.vs2.2xlarge (48 vCPU, 192 GiB combined), about 95% 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.
| Region | AWS on-demand | AWS Spot | 1-yr Reserved | 3-yr Reserved | Rackspace Spot | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US East, N. Virginia | $2.540 | $0.947 | $0.123 | $2.417 savings | ||
| US Central, Chicago | no AWS region | $0.123 | ||||
| US Central, Dallas | no AWS region | $0.153 | ||||
| Hong Kong | $0.033 | |||||
| Sydney, Australia | $3.175 | $1.397 | $0.483 | $2.692 savings | ||
| London, UK | $2.937 | $1.001 | $0.663 | $2.274 savings | ||
| US West, San Jose | $2.963 | $0.958 | $0.453 | $2.510 savings | ||
| US Central, Dallas 2 | no AWS region | $0.003 | ||||
| US East, N. Virginia 2 | $2.540 | $0.947 | $0.453 | $2.087 savings |