AWS m6i : The why you should abandon your m5
Around 2 years after the last m5 and m5a, AWS renewed its Intel series with m6i. In short and avoiding to repeat their announce, they offer better CPU performance, a larger network bandwidth and for the same price than the m5 series. Yes, this is just a provider's annoucement, so let's dive together on these assertions with a Price/Performance benchmark.
From a pricing perspective, nothing changes
In the continiuty of the other general purpose VMs (M), we have a copy-paste of CPU/RAM specs, so nothing to reshape except if you take in account the performance. If you use to pay $0.46 for a m5.2xlarge in Frankfurt, after a migration the bill at the end of the month will remain the same.
| Instance type | Hourly price |
|---|---|
| m5.2xlarge | $0.460 |
| m5a.2xlarge | $0.416 |
| m6i.2xlarge | $0.460 |
Always the latest CPU
The CPU race is picking up again, there are mainly Intel, AMD and ARM through the custom Graviton 2. Facing this, AWS clarifies its gamification and m5 pass to m6i accompanied by the gain implied by this new version. And what it is this gain ?
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From our tests, there's no aspect where m5 or m5a can argue to have an advantage compared to m6i. On the left, you can see a comparison using Geekbench 5, it covers Integer, Floating Point and Cryptography domains.
It is the best bang for your buck
No need to have a PhD to guess that with the same price and higher performance, the ROI will be better for the latest series. This lets no doubt, you'll only have gains by changing the instance_type in your Terraform and update your infrastructure.
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