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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

#31

Post by endorphone »

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…

"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 am right now, just as anyone who is paying attention is, but I can still recognize it)

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't realize I stepped into a Cloudflare circlejerk. Apologies and carry on. So brave!

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#32

Post by AznHisoka »

lukevp wrote: post #16
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #9

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.

Not Akamai but similar experience here. I've heard good things about CloudFront, but I believe it's mostly on the CDN side? Does it do things like authenticated origin pulls (client cert from provider presented to your origin), automatic SSL certs, health checks w/ failover, DDoS and WAF protection and unlimited bandwidth? The WAF was one of the reasons we switched, our existing provider wanted to charge us 10x more…

Fastly?

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#33

Post by sounds »

endorphone wrote: post #31
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…

"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…

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.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#34

Post by iforgotpassword »

endorphone wrote: post #31
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…

"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.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#35

Post by PaulKeeble »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #21
PaulKeeble wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clockspeed/IPC. Intel still is a bit quicker on average in games, about 7% compared to the equivalently priced Ryzen CPU. Some games, especially older ones, it can be as much as 20% for some outliers that are still quite popular. Intel is also tending to win in lowly threaded desktop applications because it can boost higher for longer. AMD's single-core boost is for quite short periods and only on one core with a qui…

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.

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 to 35%. As its narrowed AMD has also made plenty of wins too, it is now highly dependent on games played and if something you always play favours one over another.

Whether you then choose Intel depends on the circumstances, but the facts are the facts.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#36

Post by sersi »

AznHisoka wrote: post #32
lukevp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Akamai but similar experience here. I've heard good things about CloudFront, but I believe it's mostly on the CDN side? Does it do things like authenticated origin pulls (client cert from provider presented to your origin), automatic SSL certs, health checks w/ failover, DDoS and WAF protection and unlimited bandwidth? The WAF was one of the reasons we switched, our existing provider wanted to charge us 10x more…

Fastly?

I'm also rather interested to know if it is Fastly, I am considering switching away from them. The control fastly offer through the VCL is great but cloudflare workers look really great.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#37

Post by endorphone »

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…

While we haven't seen it for a while, this is real competition. In response Intel dramatically dropped prices (by over half) of their Xeon's within the past couple of days. And hopefully they'll refresh their line again.

https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3352/intel-refreshes-2nd-gen-...

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#38

Post by endorphone »

sounds wrote: post #33
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…

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 whatever criteria they targeted, and chose it. Story at 11. Saying they "abandoned" Intel is uproarious given that if Intel pushes out a new 128-core Xeon at a decent price, they'd as easily "abandon" AMD for Intel.

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#39

Post by microcolonel »

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…

> 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.

AFAIK every ASRock AM4 motherboard supports ECC.

Also, most Intel processors do not support ECC at all, except the ones which are competing (in some limited sense, since they are being absolutely crushed at most price points) with Threadripper, in which case, ECC is available across the board (and glorious quad-channel memory).

Re: Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

#40

Post by LeoNatan25 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #35
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.

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.

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