Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

Title is "Technical Details of Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers"

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 you're a home user (gamer, programmer), is there any reason to buy Intel today? I'm about to buy another motherboard & CPU and considering AMD for the first time. In the past, I avoided it because AMD had an incompatibility (e.g. VMware) that kept me on Intel.

(E.g. previous example of AMD showstopping bug affecting VMware: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/456094)

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 us with setup because the front end didn’t support some feature we needed. With CF we signed up one day and have never had to have manual changes made by support, and the health checks, load balancing and failover have worked from day one. With the competitor the health check story did not live up to the reality and we had several outages related to the failover system not recovering properly.

When they publish these blog posts, it shows to me that they are willing to consider bold moves and that they aren’t afraid to be different. Also, that their architecture has been designed with this agility in mind. I’ve visited their offices and while their corporate culture didn’t seem like the best fit for me, I liked the team and what they are doing.

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 more work for our software engineering teams. We did this leading up to the launch of Qualcomm’s Centriq server CPU, which eventually got shuttered. While none of the off-the-shelf ARM CPUs available this moment are interesting to us, we remain optimistic about high core count offerings launching in 2020 and beyond, and look forward to a day when our servers are a mix of x86 (Intel and AMD) and ARM."

In two years followed by "Why we are switching from Intel to RISC-V" and two years after that "Why we are switching from Intel to POWER".