The EPYC journey continues to Milan in Cloudflare’s 11th generation Edge Server

Cloudflare's hardware engineering team has been working on their generation 11 server since mid-2020, with the goal of introducing a new server platform to their edge network every 12 to 18 months. The design of these servers is in parallel with efforts to design next-generation edge servers using the Ampere Altra Arm architecture. AMD EPYC 7713 64-Core Processor was chosen for the generation 11 server, providing a 29% performance boost over the previous model while maintaining similar power consumption and thermal properties. The memory configuration has been updated to 384GB DDR4-3200, offering a several percent performance improvement with cost benefits. Samsung's PM9A3 SSDs were selected for Gen 11, providing a significant increase in read and write bandwidths compared to the previous generation drives. The network front remains unchanged with Mellanox ConnectX-4 dual-port 25G Ethernet. Cloudflare is also deploying open source firmware using OpenBMC for enhanced transparency, security, and integrity.