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Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

blog.cloudflare.com

101–110 of 123 posts

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#102
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's still like that and everything you might want to do is disabled by default. You have to go through a sales/contract process to get each feature turned on inidividually.

They should just set the price for each feature and charge us based on usage. We're actively migrating to CloudFront because we're sick of playing these games.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#103
post #94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your use case but the most recent GPU encoders are pretty solid actually. Used to be that they were awful for quality, but more recently they seem to have vastly improved.

The person above was asking what people use AVX512 for and video encoding is a big use case, better GPU encoders don't change that.

The person above also pointed out that things like machine learning are often better done on a GPU anyways. Certainly if you offload your video encoding to your GPU it does change the value proposition of that entirely.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#104

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 personally have not used it but AMD does have a cross platform profiler available, AMD uProf. Thought I would post in case it was a situation of not knowing it exists instead of having used it and found it severely lacking vs vTune.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#105

Let's put it this way. I'd rather program single core applications on my i5-4690k than any other ryzen series chips including threadrippers with 12+ cores. I have used two threadrippers for more than 6 months. Linux still runs faster on i5-4690k which is 6 years old

Odd, I switched from that processor to the AMD 2700 last month and I'm enjoying the legroom.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not irrelevant if Intel has tools to let you close that gap easily.

Tools can't close a gap of entire cores, much less twice or more of them.

It's a matter of principle.

Some people don't want cores that you can't gather insight into how you are spending/wasting their time.

I'm not a direct customer of Intel or AMD, but in general I would trade off clock speed/cores/cost for insight into what my software is doing.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#107
post #103
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person above was asking what people use AVX512 for and video encoding is a big use case, better GPU encoders don't change that.

The person above also pointed out that things like machine learning are often better done on a GPU anyways. Certainly if you offload your video encoding to your GPU it does change the value proposition of that entirely.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly but it seems like you are making some sort of prediction of the future.

Video encoding, especially newer codecs like HEVC and VP9 are CPU intensive and SIMD optimized tasks that people are doing right now.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#108
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…

The rr debugger, which is an amazing productivity enhancer for C/C++ development, still doesn't support AMD: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034

i wonder why doesn't AMD sponsor these kind of projects to get maintainers to support their CPU. it helps both parties.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#109
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 bette…

dont use this site. they do all kind of shady things to make Intel CPUs look better

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/chco8h/userbenchm...

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#110
post #73

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…

This just reminded me of some older article on Numpy performance on Intel vs AMD [1].

I’m not posting this to bash AMD. Just trying to make point that the software side can matter a lot and from end customer point-of-view this can make a huge difference.

[1] https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/AMD-Ryzen-3900X-vs-Int...

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