The CDN provider Cloudflare has switched to AMD for the tenth generation of its servers at six US locations and no longer uses custom Intel CPUs there. This change is to take place in the future for further systems worldwide. Over nine generations Intel Xeon processors – also in custom-made products – have been used so far. AMD’s Epyc 7642 will now work inside Gen10. Decisive for the change was the higher performance and lower price of AMD’s Epyc.
Cloudflare: Gen 10 with AMDs Epyc 7642 with 48 CPU cores
Cloudflare built into the Gen 10 of its server AMDs Epyc 7642 with 48 CPU cores as a single-socket version, which is not regularly available. The usual 2.3 GHz of a processor was also drilled to 2.4 GHz. A good energy efficiency is achieved by a low thermal dissipation of 225 watts. A server node with two Xeon special designs can thus be replaced by a node with an Epyc 7642.
As memory 256 GB remain available, which is now used in the form of DDR4-2933 instead of DDR4-2666. Cloudflare indicates a performance increase of 36 percent through these changes. Nvidias Mellanox again supplies the 25G network cards and the 3 TB memory is now realized with Samsung NVMe SSDs instead of Intel Sata SSDs. One node also has a free PCIe slot. Cloudflare is thinking about possibly using a GPU or other accelerator here.
In the previous nine server generations Cloudflare always relied on Intel CPUs. Generation 9, for example, was based on Skylake SP. Here, custom-built CPUs were used, which offered 24 cores with 1.9 GHz and 150 watts. These CPUs are similar to the Xeon Platinum 8160F – only that they work slower and more economically. Here again, energy efficiency was important for the CDN provider Cloudflare.
