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Cloudflare claims to be into a new generation of its servers already will not install Intel processors. The company reportedly changes servers every 12 to 18 months and has been working on the eleventh generation of servers since last year. One of the most important indicators is the number of requests for watts of electricity handled, which must be more advantageous compared to the previous generation of servers.
In addition to the Intel and AMD processors, the ARM Ampere Altra architecture, in which Cloudflare has high hopes, has also been shortlisted for the next generation of processor selection. For the eleventh generation, Xeon processors with Ice Lake architecture were tested, but in the end they proved to be too energy-intensive. Intel chips were able to compete with AMD in terms of gross performance, but power consumption was hundreds of watts higher on each server – that’s a huge difference. That’s why Intel was uninteresting for us in terms of power per watt,
explains in a blog post Chris Howells z Cloudflare.
Therefore, in the end, the company decided to deploy 64-core AMD EPYC 7713 processors. Power was also saved on disks, instead of the original three, only two with a higher capacity of 1.92 TB were deployed. Using 512 GB of RAM turned out to be an unnecessary expense, so in the end it was decided to 384 GB. Mellanox ConnectX-4 two-port 25GE card takes care of networking.
The result of the generational change is a 29% increase in server performance without increasing their power consumption. Cloudflare has these servers located in 200 locations around the world. The company certainly does not reject Intel processors and hopes that the next Sapphire Rapids architecture will offer a better performance-to-power ratio.
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