The p5en.48xlarge is a GPU AWS EC2 instance: 192 vCPU and 2048 GiB of memory, 10.67 GiB per vCPU. In the name, "p" is accelerated computing, "5" is the generation, "en" marks extended capacity and enhanced networking and "48xlarge" is the size within the p5en family. It runs on Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) at 3.2 GHz, and AWS introduced it in December 2024. p5en is the current generation of the p family, so there is no newer AWS size to migrate to. Rackspace Spot has no equivalent to offer: 8 × NVIDIA H200 wired together behind a high-speed interconnect is one tightly coupled machine, not 8 independent nodes — and that interconnect is usually what the instance was bought for. Spot's largest VM tops out at 16 vCPU and 128 GiB, and even that is not the missing piece here. The table below prices what AWS charges; the honest answer on the Spot side is that this workload stays where it is.
Match qualityNo equivalent
p5en.48xlarge is 8 GPUs (1128 GiB VRAM) wired together inside one chassis. The interconnect is what you bought — that is what makes it one accelerator with pooled memory rather than several machines — and Rackspace Spot has nothing that reproduces it. The Spot GPU class is built on the NVIDIA A30 (Ampere, 24 GB VRAM), and separate nodes of it on ordinary datacentre networking are not a substitute for a single interconnect-joined node.
Split the job across independent single-GPU nodes only if it is data-parallel with no per-step synchronisation and the model fits one card. Model-parallel work, or anything synchronising gradients every step, does not survive the move. Rackspace Spot sells x86_64 Kubernetes nodes up to 16 vCPU, plus one NVIDIA A30 GPU class.
Pricing by region
1 hr
Region
AWS on-demand
AWS Spot
1-yr Reserved
3-yr Reserved
Rackspace Spot
You save
US East, N. Virginia
$63.296
$38.548
US Central, Chicago
no AWS region
US Central, Dallas
no AWS region
Hong Kong
Sydney, Australia
London, UK
US West, San Jose
$79.120
$79.120
US Central, Dallas 2
no AWS region
US East, N. Virginia 2
$63.296
$38.548
When to use it
Good for
●Remote graphics workstations and rendering
●CUDA-accelerated batch jobs
●Model inference and embedding generation
●Workloads that fit inside 2048 GiB of RAM
●Jobs that want 8 × 3,800 GB of local NVMe scratch space
●Network-heavy services — AWS rates this size at 3200 Gigabit
Avoid if
●The working set needs more than 2048 GiB of RAM
●Anything the CPU can do fast enough. GPU hours are the most expensive on the price list.
●More than 10.67 GiB of RAM per vCPU is needed — that ratio is fixed for the whole family
●The work is single-threaded. Most of these 192 vCPU would sit idle.
Rackspace Spot sells spare capacity at market prices. You pay what the market decides, not a list price.
Spot sells spare capacity at market prices. It is the cheapest compute on the internet.
Prices are set by supply and demand. You pay what the market decides.
Compute is delivered as fully managed Kubernetes. All infrastructure is taken care of.
Egress costs $0.01/GB after the free allowance. AWS charges $0.09/GB.
