Haven’t actively used EC2 in a while, but wanted to check out the pricing after this week’s announcement that Amazon is making their own CPUs. On first glance, the “a1” instances don’t look cheaper. Maybe it’s not right to compare them directly to comparable “t3” instances?

@manton I wouldn't expect the on-demand price to be lower, but for specific types of loads, you'll save because you'll process your loads faster.

@oyam Got it, thanks!

@manton I was expecting lower pricing as well. Early benchmarks do show good performance for the price for specific types of work, but it’s clear that this is a 1.0. That said, I’m shorting Intel as it’s pretty clear that AWS will be able to replicate what Apple has done for mobile chips in the server space.

@cleverdevil Interesting, I hadn't seen that!

@manton the other thing to consider is a1 instances aren't burstable like a t3 is. So although they're not cheaper then a t3 you get the full CPU available 100% so if you're CPU bound the a1's might be cheaper then a m/c instance. If your workload is possible on the arm chip.

@manton The smallest a1 is a medium, so I assume they mean pricing vs. other medium instances. However, without seeing benchmarks it's hard to know what to really compare against (and on basic specs it doesn't look comparable to other mediums).