Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

Cloudflare has deployed AMD's EPYC processors in its tenth generation server platform, marking the first time it is not using Intel components for any major server components. The Gen X server processes as much as 36% more requests while costing substantially less than its predecessor, Gen 9. It also enables a significant decrease in L3 cache miss rate and NGINX p99 latency. The AMD EPYC 7642 processor was selected after benchmarking various CPUs for key workloads such as cryptography, compression, regular expressions, and LuaJIT. Gen X server performance is further enhanced by partnering with AMD to tune the processor, achieving an additional 6% performance boost. Additionally, Cloudflare uses Secure Memory Encryption (SME) within the System on a Chip architecture of the AMD EPYC line for improved security without significant decrease in performance.