US cheapest spot
N. Virginia
us-east-1
spot · 7-day average $0.0433/hr
on-demand$0.1652
spot interrupt freq 5-10%
m5zn.large
Custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency up to 4.5 GHz. Up to 45% better single-threaded compute performance than M5 instances, 100 Gbps networking, Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) support, up to 19 Gbps throughput to Amazon EBS, and available as a bare metal option (`M5zn.metal`).
available for self-hosted runners on RunsOn
single-thread · passmark
2,559pts
vcpus
2
1 core × 2 threads
memory
8 GiB
ram
clock speed
4.5 GHz
max frequency
architecture
x86_64
x64
Measured
2 jobs of 2 finished in the EC2 CPU sweep, 30 Sep–10 Oct: the values are their medians. Every job links its log on the open harness.
CPU Mark
2,920
PassMark, both vCPUs
cores of work
1.64
sysbench, 2 threads ÷ 1
sysbench 1 thread
1,475
events per second
7-zip
8,998
MIPS, all threads
| date | suite | single-thread | capacity | job log |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Oct 2026 | EC2 CPU sweep | 2,569 | spot | job log ↗ |
| 30 Sep 2026 | EC2 CPU sweep | 2,549 | on-demand | job log ↗ |
EC2 instance family: m5zn
What the family is built for, the silicon underneath, and how to ask RunsOn for it.
m5zn general purpose
cpu type
Intel Xeon Platinum 8252C — Custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency up to 4.5 GHz
architecture
x64 · x86_64
highlights
Up to 45% better single-threaded compute performance than M5 instances, 100 Gbps networking, Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) support, up to 19 Gbps throughput to Amazon EBS, and available as a bare metal option (`M5zn.metal`)
released
December 2020
.github/workflows/ci.yml yaml
jobs: build: runs-on: - runs-on=${{ github.run_id }} - family=m5zn - cpu=2
the label is a query — each line one constraint, resolved at launch. job labels →
Availability & price by region
Spot is the 7-day average of the cheapest zone's spot price in each region, from the RunsOn finder: an estimate of an hour in your own AWS account, where RunsOn adds no markup. The bar shows how far it runs under on-demand; the badge is AWS's spot-interruption band for the type.
US
Oregon
us-west-2
spot · 7-day average $0.0501/hr
on-demand$0.1652
spot interrupt freq >20%
IE
Ireland
eu-west-1
spot · 7-day average $0.0684/hr
on-demand$0.1841
spot interrupt freq <5%
DE
Frankfurt
eu-central-1
spot · 7-day average $0.0603/hr
on-demand$0.1979
spot interrupt freq 10-15%
Spot is the cheapest availability zone's spot price at each of the RunsOn finder's fetches (every 90 minutes), averaged over 7 days; on-demand is the Linux list price. Savings compare the two. Prices fetched 12 Oct 2026. The interruption band is AWS Spot Advisor's, fetched 12 Oct 2026.
About these benchmarks
The open benchmark harness launches m5zn.large as a RunsOn runner and runs PassMark PerformanceTest (CPU Single
Threaded and CPU Mark), sysbench on one thread and on every thread, and 7-Zip's built-in benchmark. These numbers come from the
EC2 CPU sweep, the suite that measured this type in the most runs; each is the median over its runs of the current
workload definition in the last 75 days.
A type takes a place once it has 3 runs. A type within 5% of the type heading its group shares that place (“joint #2”); a lead under 5% is no lead.
Prices come from the RunsOn finder for the four regions shown; savings compare its 7-day average spot price with the on-demand price. RunsOn launches this type the same way for any job: ephemeral EC2 in your account, one CloudFormation stack. More in the methodology.
Run m5zn.large in your own account.
The benchmark runs on the same RunsOn anyone can deploy. One CloudFormation stack, your AWS account, ~10 minutes.