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Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#71

Post by SkyMarshal »

stingraycharles wrote: post #61
wjnc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Different leadership this time, maybe the new crew understands this better.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#72

Post by pedrocr »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #68
pedrocr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>>but maybe the last few AMD chips also killed that.

It's definitely quite close but PassMark just shows that it's a tie and it's not necessarily representative of game workloads. It all depends on how much overclocking headroom there is. The enthusiasts for this kind of thing will throw great cooling at these chips and get the best out of them. I wouldn't be surprised if the advantage AMD now has in fabrication meant it also won there though.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#73

Post by effie »

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 doubt tooling is the problem that is slowing down AMD adoption. Compiler or special applications writers care about that. These are not the ones who pay AMD for their platform. It's the big businesses - most care about stability, predictability, reliability hence they stay with Intel. Those that are interested mostly in bang/buck, like Cloudflare, choose to go with AMD, tooling or no tooling. You don't need tooling to check that AMD is far more efficient now, you just do some basic load tests and the result is easy to understand.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#74

Post by mlyle »

effie wrote: post #73
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 doubt tooling is the problem that is slowing down AMD adoption. Compiler or special applications writers care about that. These are not the ones who pay AMD for their platform. It's the big businesses - most care about stability, predictability, reliability hence they stay with Intel. Those that are interested mostly in bang/buck, like Cloudflare, choose to go with AMD, tooling or no tooling. You don't need tooling…

If you have crappy tooling, the software other people write -- in house or commercial software-- runs crappier on your hardware.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#75

Post by 764_OC »

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 interested to know where people use AVX-512. Off the top of my head, I can think of machine learning and crypto. Machine learning---that is, matrix/tensor stuff---seems more like a GPU workload. That leaves crypto, but most crypto (eg ChaCha or Keccak) only make use of 128 or 256-bit extensions (in fact, they seem to designed with this constraint in mind.)

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#76

Post by ohyeshedid »

jgrahamc wrote: post #65
endorphone wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't mean to hijack, but I'm definitely curious.

Since you're the CTO of Cloudflare, and you posted the OP; Why did you replace the word 'Chose', in the linked title, with the word 'abandoned' here?

That comes across as real click-baity.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#77

Post by brobinson »

764_OC wrote: post #75
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 interested to know where people use AVX-512. Off the top of my head, I can think of machine learning and crypto. Machine learning---that is, matrix/tensor stuff---seems more like a GPU workload. That leaves crypto, but most crypto (eg ChaCha or Keccak) only make use of 128 or 256-bit extensions (in fact, they seem to designed with this constraint in mind.)

Video encoding comes to mind.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#78

Post by dpacmittal »

mlyle wrote: post #74
effie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt tooling is the problem that is slowing down AMD adoption. Compiler or special applications writers care about that. These are not the ones who pay AMD for their platform. It's the big businesses - most care about stability, predictability, reliability hence they stay with Intel. Those that are interested mostly in bang/buck, like Cloudflare, choose to go with AMD, tooling or no tooling. You don't need tooling…

If you have crappy tooling, the software other people write -- in house or commercial software-- runs crappier on your hardware.

But it's irrelevant if it works faster than intel

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#79

Post by balls187 »

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…

Anecdotally, I've heard similar issues with AMD chip-sets and RAM.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#80

Post by balls187 »

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…

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9700K-vs...

Comparing the similar priced Intel and AMD CPU's shows Intel has a slight advantage.

Reading the conclusion, it seems for Overclocked performance, AMD is the winner, especially when factoring in large core workloads.

As games and typical "home-user" scenarios are not designed to take advantage of large multi-core CPU's, Intel would appear to be the better choice at the ~$350 CPU level.

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