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Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

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Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#21

Post by LeoNatan25 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #14
jasode wrote: post #4

Yes, there are lots of stories of individuals and companies choosing AMD over Intel. For me, what's more interesting would be any contrarian view listing the compelling reasons to pay the higher price for Intel instead of AMD. Off the top my head, some reasons would be: - Intel AVX-512 instruction set - Intel 4 and 8 sockets What realistic workloads have a better performance/cost advantage on Intel vs AMD EPYC? If yo…

Clockspeed/IPC. Intel still is a bit quicker on average in games, about 7% compared to the equivalently priced Ryzen CPU. Some games, especially older ones, it can be as much as 20% for some outliers that are still quite popular. Intel is also tending to win in lowly threaded desktop applications because it can boost higher for longer. AMD's single-core boost is for quite short periods and only on one core with a qui…

You are several years out of date. Please take a look at benchmarks and real usage from the last few months. With Zen 2, AMD has won the IPC game. Their Threadripper 64 core CPUs boost to 4GHz. There is just no alternative to this kind of performance to be found anywhere in Intel products right now.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#22

Post by Spooky23 »

jasode wrote: post #4

Yes, there are lots of stories of individuals and companies choosing AMD over Intel. For me, what's more interesting would be any contrarian view listing the compelling reasons to pay the higher price for Intel instead of AMD. Off the top my head, some reasons would be: - Intel AVX-512 instruction set - Intel 4 and 8 sockets What realistic workloads have a better performance/cost advantage on Intel vs AMD EPYC? If yo…

For home users, nothing. For larger businesses, it’s all about dollars, and there are some good use cases for AMD.

I would say that in the past, some OEMs have very fickle support for AMD lines, and you can run into problems if you have many of them affected by some obscure bug that isn’t getting fixed.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#23

Post by marcosdumay »

myself248 wrote: post #12
MikusR wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In two years followed by "Why we are switching from Intel to RISC-V" and two years after that "Why we are switching from Intel to POWER".

No love for itanium? Aww.

I have never seen anyone have any love for Itanium.

It's such a beautiful architecture, but nobody seems to touch it and get out unharmed.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#24

Post by tmpz22 »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #21
PaulKeeble wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clockspeed/IPC. Intel still is a bit quicker on average in games, about 7% compared to the equivalently priced Ryzen CPU. Some games, especially older ones, it can be as much as 20% for some outliers that are still quite popular. Intel is also tending to win in lowly threaded desktop applications because it can boost higher for longer. AMD's single-core boost is for quite short periods and only on one core with a qui…

You are several years out of date. Please take a look at benchmarks and real usage from the last few months. With Zen 2, AMD has won the IPC game. Their Threadripper 64 core CPUs boost to 4GHz. There is just no alternative to this kind of performance to be found anywhere in Intel products right now.

Speaking specifically for gaming, it’s interesting to see trends for machine specs by top streamers - the ones pulling in millions per year who usually pay big money for the best most gluttonous machines available. For the most part you see them running the intel 9900K/KS line HOWEVER many of them were built in late 2018 when both that chip and the 2080TI gpus came out.

It’ll be interesting to see what standard they set this summer when the new Nvidia GPU comes out. I expect everyone will upgrade then including CPUs if they deem a different CPU available.

Also a slight tangent, it’ll be interesting to see how the competitive landscape shakes out after the pricing hike in hardware due to logistics slow downs in Asia due to all the quarantines going on. Linus TEch Tips just did a great video on this, maybe when the dust settles AMD will be the undisputed champion.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#25

Post by matt2000 »

jgrahamc wrote: post #8
MikusR wrote: post #5

Two years ago they switched to ARM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16646701

We tried to switch to ARM. We maintain our ARM port of all our code for the day there are servers we can use. However, we are in production with AMD now. From one of the posts: "Readers of our blog might remember our excitement around ARM processors. We even ported the entirety of our software stack to run on ARM, just as it does with x86, and have been maintaining that ever since even though it calls for slightly mo…

Do you see any ARM chips on the horizon this year or next that might change the equation? It looks like Amazon is seeing 40% better performance per watt (I think they said the power draw is comparable somewhere) with their custom design, will a commercially available chip be able to match that soon?

Side note: Thanks for making a great product and keeping it cheap/free for hobby projects! I got comfortable with the basic features on a small project and now advocate for it's use regularly.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#26

Post by throw_554323 »

jasode wrote: post #4

Yes, there are lots of stories of individuals and companies choosing AMD over Intel. For me, what's more interesting would be any contrarian view listing the compelling reasons to pay the higher price for Intel instead of AMD. Off the top my head, some reasons would be: - Intel AVX-512 instruction set - Intel 4 and 8 sockets What realistic workloads have a better performance/cost advantage on Intel vs AMD EPYC? If yo…

> If you're a home user (gamer, programmer), is there any reason to buy Intel today?

If you need EEC ram?

I know technically AMD supports it for their Ryzen line, but everything I’ve read says it’s up to the motherboard manufacturer to support it. And even if the motherboard manufacturer says you can use ECC ram, it doesn’t mean it will actually “use” it correctly.

So you mainly need to rely on others doing tests on their own systems to confirm if the motherboard actually uses it.

My understanding is that you need to use the EPYC line for guaranteed ECC usage, which is really expensive.

Intel’s W series Xeons start off at a reasonable price, and there are even cheaper Celerons that will use ECC ram.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#27

Post by LeoNatan25 »

tmpz22 wrote: post #24
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are several years out of date. Please take a look at benchmarks and real usage from the last few months. With Zen 2, AMD has won the IPC game. Their Threadripper 64 core CPUs boost to 4GHz. There is just no alternative to this kind of performance to be found anywhere in Intel products right now.

Speaking specifically for gaming, it’s interesting to see trends for machine specs by top streamers - the ones pulling in millions per year who usually pay big money for the best most gluttonous machines available. For the most part you see them running the intel 9900K/KS line HOWEVER many of them were built in late 2018 when both that chip and the 2080TI gpus came out. It’ll be interesting to see what standard they…

The only advantage 9900K/KS have for gaming is that their default boost is very high (KS is 5GHz). Overclock an AMD 3900X or 3800X, and that advantage is moot at best and nonexistent at worst.

Also, don't forget that these "streamers" are basically blank canvas advertisement machines, "putting out" to whoever pays top money, be it Intel, which is very active in that scene, the various motherboard companies which want to advertise their Intel-geared products and cooling solutions, which sometimes are geared toward Intel CPUs. The last two are changing slowly. In the last year, the amount of B450/X570 chipset motherboards flooding the market was staggering. It was very clear where the wind is blowing in the gaming segments. Intel is still a very high-paying force, but you will start seeing "streamers" also take the AMD route over time.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#28

Post by fierarul »

ddevault wrote: post #17

SourceHut runs its performance critical infrastructure (git, builds) on AMD EPYC. These CPUs are sweeeet. The hard part is sourcing motherboards. I currently buy them from some dude in Germany on eBay because he's the only consistent source I've been able to find.

> SourceHut runs its performance critical infrastructure (git, builds) on AMD EPYC. These CPUs are sweeeet. The hard part is sourcing motherboards. I currently buy them from some dude in Germany on eBay because he's the only consistent source I've been able to find.

Heh, you know that guy is with / getting a visit from the German BDN now.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#29

Post by riobard »

jgrahamc wrote: post #8
MikusR wrote: post #5

Two years ago they switched to ARM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16646701

We tried to switch to ARM. We maintain our ARM port of all our code for the day there are servers we can use. However, we are in production with AMD now. From one of the posts: "Readers of our blog might remember our excitement around ARM processors. We even ported the entirety of our software stack to run on ARM, just as it does with x86, and have been maintaining that ever since even though it calls for slightly mo…

Dear John,

As a happy Cloudflare user (free plan for personal use tho) and stock investor, I'm really pleased to see all your excellent and hard work and appreciate open sharing!

I've been tracking your ARM effort for a while (and did my math when you released Gen9 server! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18190891). I'm not sure how much you could share on what happened to Falkor and Qualcomm's ARM server business in general, but if possible, please do have a similar writeup. It would be extremely interesting and valuable to the whole industry.

Meanwhile I'd assume this must have been discussed internally, but have you ever considered designing your own ARM SoC (and boards) given that the licensing model actually could work (compared to the impossibility of licensing x86)? I know Cloudflare is still a small company (compared to the big four) and maybe the timing is not right and/or scale is not yet there, but you do have this option in the long run. If possible, I'd also like to hear your thoughts on this.

Anyway, thanks for the great writeup and keep the good work going! ^_^

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#30

Post by sauerbraten »

fierarul wrote: post #28
ddevault wrote: post #17

SourceHut runs its performance critical infrastructure (git, builds) on AMD EPYC. These CPUs are sweeeet. The hard part is sourcing motherboards. I currently buy them from some dude in Germany on eBay because he's the only consistent source I've been able to find.

> SourceHut runs its performance critical infrastructure (git, builds) on AMD EPYC. These CPUs are sweeeet. The hard part is sourcing motherboards. I currently buy them from some dude in Germany on eBay because he's the only consistent source I've been able to find. Heh, you know that guy is with / getting a visit from the German BDN now.

*BND, from Bundesnachrichtendienst
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