Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 123 posts

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#41

Post by endorphone »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #34
endorphone wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it shows to me that they are willing to consider bold moves and that they aren’t afraid to be different" Because they benchmarked a drop-in-place commodity replacement as being a better performance-per-dollar for their operation? I'm not sure what's bold about that. I find the notion that they posted a blog entry about this pretty bizarre -- almost rinky-dink. It seems like it's pandering to the AMD fanbase (which I…

Oh, have you ever worked at a traditional tech company? Bureaucracy, contracts, silly guidelines often lead to very stifled vendor lock in. Even if the whole tech department says. "hey we should go AMD" giving every manager involved enough time to make themselves important over the issue can cost you half a decade.

At a pure tech company, moves across architectures and platforms is an absolute non-story unless the company is broken: Choose and implement hardware to achieve desired goals at the right price points. Reassess as the industry changes.

That service you are talking to might be running on a Xeon Windows Server instance on vmware, or a Neoverse N1 Linux instance over KVM. Whatever was right. Cloudflare specifically say that they try to operate this way, and probably have since day, as does any competent tech company.

It's more the tech-as-a-cost-center company that has such restrictions. The accounting shop or traditional bank where "We use X, Y and Z! We're an Intel and Dell company!", where the desktops are all running Windows 7.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#42

Post by PaulKeeble »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #40
PaulKeeble wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I am not, I talking specifically about the 3800 and 3900 verses the 9900KS. Intel is still on average faster but whether that is worth the loss in other areas really depends. The area in which Intel is faster is narrowing (high refresh rate, certain games that are lowly threaded) and the advantage is smaller. When we were talking the Zen1 CPUs things were worse than this, more like 15% average behind and up…

But you are. Facts are facts. Here are some facts: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html AMD CPUs are leading the chart with lower clock rates than Intel's 9900KS (4.0 GHz base, 5.0 GHz boost). Overclock those AMD CPUs and Intel has no advantage.

That isn't games, passmark is a wide splattering of applications, some of which clearly benefit from threading. I have talked about a particular set of circumstances in which Intel wins (and looses) and your source is garbage for that circumstance.

https://youtu.be/CGQY9yJqfMs?t=449 Here is another from GamersNexus probably one of the best places for gaming reviews out there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqQ2X1y0jvw

Here is Anandtech on the 9900KS that includes a 3900X, their methods and range of tests is pretty outdated nowadays but still the same picture emerges https://www.anandtech.com/show/14979/the-intel-core-i9-9900k...

The majority of the big outlets say the same thing about gaming and low threaded workloads on these CPUs. Intel wins that still, not by as much as it did but it still wins most of the time and on average about 7%, at worst more like 20-25%. Intel also looses sometimes, it really depends.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#43

Post by read_if_gay_ »

vbezhenar wrote: post #20
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…

I'm not considering AMD because I'm afraid of stability issues. Too many things that's just unacceptable for me happened with AMD CPUs in the past (kernel panic when compiling stuff; RNG issues zeros after suspend and so on). I don't really need that many cores and price difference is not that big to consider moving from Intel. But that's for my home usage. Anyway I'm really happy that AMD exists and releases good pr…

> I'm not considering AMD because I'm afraid of stability issues

What about the plethora of security issues that are present in Intel but not AMD CPUs? Not sure there's a case to be made that Intel CPUs have less bugs.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#44

Post by iforgotpassword »

endorphone wrote: post #41
iforgotpassword wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, have you ever worked at a traditional tech company? Bureaucracy, contracts, silly guidelines often lead to very stifled vendor lock in. Even if the whole tech department says. "hey we should go AMD" giving every manager involved enough time to make themselves important over the issue can cost you half a decade.

At a pure tech company, moves across architectures and platforms is an absolute non-story unless the company is broken: Choose and implement hardware to achieve desired goals at the right price points. Reassess as the industry changes. That service you are talking to might be running on a Xeon Windows Server instance on vmware, or a Neoverse N1 Linux instance over KVM. Whatever was right. Cloudflare specifically say…

We should maybe define pure and traditional better, but yes, I was mostly thinking companies which (heavily) rely on tech, but more as a commodity driving their actual business, and never tried to push the tech to its limits.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#45

Post by wzy »

lukevp wrote: post #6

I’m a big fan of CloudFlare. I own a little stock, and I moved our company over to it after running on a competitor for about a year. CloudFlare has been much better. Whenever I use the front end, it just feels like it’s made by people who actually need to use this stuff, and it is so straightforward. The api is great too. When we were with the competition it was ridiculous how often we had to have an engineer assist…

Incapsula?

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#46

Post by aloknnikhil »

I really wish AMD would focus on its tooling. The Intel VTune Amplifier is a fantastic multi-platform profiler that can help understand how effectively your software is using the hardware (Pipelining, micro-ops efficiency, cache usage, etc.).

If AMD could come up with something similar, it'd make their offering a no-brainer.

> https://software.intel.com/en-us/vtune

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#47

Post by PaulKeeble »

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…

Those that use streaming PCs are almost always using Ryzen for that purpose. They add streaming machines to allow them to run CPU encoding for h264 since it produces a better image than NVEnc and it is very parallelisable and just a lot faster on Ryzen at the same price as a result. Gaming wise they are chose and kept 9900K(S)s for a good performance reason but they are also using Ryzen for video rendering and streaming purposes very often as it tends to do the scrubbing and rendering out quicker as well, but that also depends on the software you use as Premiere is mostly GPU limited except on certain effects.

As far as I can see the Youtube/Streamer types are either poor and choosing Ryzen as making videos is their bottleneck and its better bang for the buck or rich and choosing the best CPU for each circumstance across a range of computers.

Programmers that game have a different trade-off. A lot of compilers aren't all that parallel and many other tools aren't either. It highly depends on the language and tooling and the program you are writing. Maybe you can get use out of 32/64 CPU with what you are using, but if you are programming a language that is single-threaded mostly (Ruby) then perhaps there isn't a lot of point on anything more than 2/4.

This is the wider issue with threading scaling generally and having two companies chasing differing things. Intel is going hard for more clock speed with minor increments at the moment while AMD is going wider at somewhat lower clock speed. IPC wise AMD has an advantage in many cases but it's by no means always the case. It is complex to choose the right thing if 20% matters to you, but if 20% doesn't then go AMD because at the same price you get a lot more cores.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#48

Post by nolok »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #9
lukevp wrote: post #6

I’m a big fan of CloudFlare. I own a little stock, and I moved our company over to it after running on a competitor for about a year. CloudFlare has been much better. Whenever I use the front end, it just feels like it’s made by people who actually need to use this stuff, and it is so straightforward. The api is great too. When we were with the competition it was ridiculous how often we had to have an engineer assist…

Come on, throw their competitor under the bus! I'm guessing it was Akamai. Every change we need to make to our Akamai distros is an up sell conversation with them. It's obnoxious. I much prefer Amazon CloudFront.

Akamai interface is like a jigsaw puzzle with several key pieces missing. Doesn't matter how much effort you put into it, how many times you did it before or how many documentation you read, part of it will still depend on evil incantation chanted to their support/billing people.

At least it was about 5 years ago when I last used it, I ran from that as fast as I could.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#50

Post by khjkhj »

lukevp wrote: post #6

I’m a big fan of CloudFlare. I own a little stock, and I moved our company over to it after running on a competitor for about a year. CloudFlare has been much better. Whenever I use the front end, it just feels like it’s made by people who actually need to use this stuff, and it is so straightforward. The api is great too. When we were with the competition it was ridiculous how often we had to have an engineer assist…

I need to pay my student loans, so Imma ask:

How much can I get for posts like this?

Post reply on HN