Analysis of the EPYC 145% performance gain in Cloudflare Gen 12 servers

Cloudflare's network spans over 330 cities in more than 120 countries, serving millions of HTTP requests and DNS queries per second. The company is focusing on developing and deploying more performant and efficient servers to support this growth. At the heart of each server lies the processor (central processing unit or CPU), which remains the biggest lever for improving performance. Cloudflare's 12th Generation server with AMD EPYC 9684-X (Genoa-X) is 145% more performant and 63% more efficient than its previous generation server. The performance gains come from various factors, including the number of cores, core frequency, thermal design power (TDP), and L3 cache size. The company conducted sensitivity analysis on three variants of 4th generation AMD EPYC processors to understand the contributing factors. Genoa-X 9684X with significantly more L3 cache offered the best performance among the three candidates, followed by Genoa 9654 and Bergamo 9754. In production, the Gen 12 server equipped with Genoa-X 9684X outperformed other options while consuming only 1.5x more power per system than its predecessor. This resulted in a 63% increase in performance per watt and improved cost structure for Cloudflare's infrastructure growth.