Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

kohtatsu wrote: post #106

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by fierarul » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 10:23 AM UTC

tbyehl wrote: post #111

fierarul wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good question and I would like to learn the answer too. According to some napkin calculations, the CPU is $5000 and will be kept in service, I guess, 5 years. The US average price is 13 cents / kWh so this 225 watts CPU will cost $1280 in electricity over those 5 years. Colocation price is probably low, let's say $50 / 1U server / month. So that's another $3000. Why is electricity the most important here? I…

Data center space is generally plentiful. Power and cooling, which for most purposes can be considered equivalent, are the scarce resource. CloudFlare is trading half their server density[0] for a ~25% gain in performance-per-watt and performance-per-node[1]. Power is the whole ball-game at scale. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tour-inside-cloudflares-g9-ser... [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/an-epyc-trip-to-rome-…

Post by arsome » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

BubRoss wrote: post #107

arsome wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by balls187 » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

tuananh wrote: post #109

balls187 wrote: post #80

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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...

Post by fluffy87 » Mon, Mar 02, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

jpalomaki wrote: post #110

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…

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...