Work out instance type comparison instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.
Comparing instances on hourly rate alone is meaningless without performance. Cost per unit of performance — rate divided by a benchmark score representative of your workload — is the only fair comparison, and it frequently favours newer or ARM-based instances that cost more per hour but deliver disproportionately more throughput.
Price-performance
cost per performance unit = hourly rate / benchmark score; lower is better
Your own workload, measured. Synthetic scores mislead badly for memory-bound, I/O-bound or vectorised code, where instance families differ by far more than their nominal specifications.
One vCPU is a full physical core rather than a thread, and the price per vCPU is lower. Where the software stack supports ARM, price-performance gains of 20 to 40 percent are common.