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Edge Compute Hardware Evolution

1 post · Mar 2026

What this trail covers

Cloudflare's edge compute hardware has evolved from cache-heavy architectures (Gen 12) to throughput-optimized designs (Gen 13). This evolution is driven by the development of new software stacks (FL2) that can leverage increased core counts and improved IPC without being bottlenecked by reduced L3 cache. This enables higher performance per watt and increased rack throughput, supporting the company's global network expansion and sustainability goals.

All Cloudflare trails
  1. Launching Cloudflare’s Gen 13 servers- trading cache for cores for 2x edge compute performanceThis post details the transition from Cloudflare's Gen 12 server fleet (AMD EPYC Genoa-X, cache-heavy) to Gen 13 (AMD EPYC Turin, throughput-optimized with higher core counts and reduced L3 cache). It describes the performance challenges encountered with the legacy FL1 stack (NGINX/LuaJIT) due to increased L3 cache miss rates and memory latency. The post highlights the successful adoption of the new FL2 software stack (Rust-based, built on Pingora/Oxy) which, by having leaner memory access patterns, unlocked the full potential of Gen 13 hardware. This resulted in up to 2x throughput and 50% better performance per watt compared to Gen 12, while maintaining latency SLAs. It also discusses hardware tuning experiments using AMD PQOS and the business impact of these improvements.