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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

#61

Post by stingraycharles »

wjnc wrote: post #60
aloknnikhil wrote: post #46

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

I think (without too much knowledge in this field) that AMD has had to play catch-up for so long in silicon that now the catch-up is complete, it will take some time to recognise organisationally that more focus on non-silicon is overdue. Silicon lives in an ecosphere, but without competitive products there's little use in investing in that ecosphere. If you suddenly get there, you need to change your game quite dras…

But wasn’t the same the case that last time they “disrupted” Intel with their amd64 and dual core CPUs? They caught up, but never really invested in the tooling. And then they lost market share again.

Why would this time be different?

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#62

Post by thedance »

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 a home user I would think a relevant aspect might be the ready availability of well-integrated systems like the NUC. I just replaced a NUC with a new NUC even though I am aware of Zen2, I know it has its qualities, and I know how to build computers.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#63

Post by [deleted] »

khjkhj wrote: post #50
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?

[deleted]

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#64

Post by jgrahamc »

riobard wrote: post #29
jgrahamc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

We're not yet at a size where designing our own ARM-based SoC makes sense.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#65

Post by jgrahamc »

endorphone wrote: post #38
sounds wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton, just a ton of intel-specific integrations and Cloudflare's switch to AMD was not just a "drop-in-place" move.

What "intel-specific integrations"? Cloudflare specifically talks about how they keep their stack runnable across a wide-range of platforms, including even entirely different instruction sets (e.g. ARM). Their own words support my statement. I'm pretty sure it was a "drop-in place" move, and they say absolutely nothing to the contrary. They benchmarked a system that performed better than their existing system for wha…

As I say in another comment... AMD makes sense for us today because of the performance per watt. We continue to keep our software ARM-ready and look at ARM-based solutions. We also continue to look at Intel. We'll use what gives us the best requests per watt.

But it is notable that these are our first servers wit NO Intel components at all.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#66

Post by wmf »

matt2000 wrote: post #25
jgrahamc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Ampere QuickSilver is looking good.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#67

Post by vbezhenar »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #43
vbezhenar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are theoretical threats for personal computer. I don't care about them and I'm disabling software mitigations on my computer.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#68

Post by MrStonedOne »

pedrocr wrote: post #11
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? There's definitely not much. I believe absolute peak single-core performance can still be slightly higher on Intel which is important for gaming, but maybe the last few AMD chips also killed that. And there are also some tools that are not well optimized or don't yet fully support AMD yet. For example: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/i…

> There's definitely not much. I believe absolute peak single-core performance can still be slightly higher on Intel

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html It's still weird to see amd anywhere near the top of this list, a few years ago the first few screenfulls were intel.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#69

Post by ohmaigad »

throw_554323 wrote: post #26
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…

It is the same thing with Intel - motherboard must support ECC and actually use it.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#70

Post by riobard »

jgrahamc wrote: post #64
riobard wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

We're not yet at a size where designing our own ARM-based SoC makes sense.

I see. Thanks for the straight answer!
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