Cloudflare Says Intel is Not Inside its Next-gen Servers – Ice Lake Melted its Energy Budget
upstart writes:
Cloudflare says Intel is not inside its next-gen servers - Ice Lake melted its energy budget:
Cloudflare has revealed that it was unable to put Intel inside its new home-brew servers, because they just used too much energy.
A Tuesday post by platform operations engineer Chris Howells reveals that Cloudflare has been working on designs for an eleventh-generation server since mid-2020.
"We evaluated Intel's latest generation of 'Ice Lake' Xeon processors," Howells wrote. "Although Intel's chips were able to compete with AMD in terms of raw performance, the power consumption was several hundred watts higher per server - that's enormous."
Fatally enormous - Cloudflare's evaluation saw it adopt AMD's 64-core Epyc 7713 for the servers it deploys to over 200 edge locations around the world.
Power savings also influenced a decision to go from three disks to two in the new design. A pair of 1.92TB Samsung drives replaced the three of the Korean giant's 960GB units found in previous designs. The net gain was a terabyte of capacity, and six fewer watts of power consumption.
[...] "We investigated higher-speed Ethernet, but we do not currently see this as beneficial," Howells wrote. That's not a brickbat for fast Ethernet, but a decision made possible by Cloudflare's highly distributed architecture that removes the need for higher speeds and the higher cost of faster kit.
See also:
- https://hothardware.com/news/cloudflare-dumps-intel-amd-epyc-gen-x-servers
- https://www.techzine.eu/news/cloud/64718/cloudflare-chooses-amd-to-power-its-new-generation-of-servers/
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