Getting to the Core: Benchmarking Cloudflare’s Latest Server Hardware

This post details the upgrade of Cloudflare's core server hardware, specifically the Core Compute 2020 and Core Storage 2020 variants. The Core Compute 2020 servers transitioned from dual-socket Intel Xeon to single-socket AMD EPYC 7642 processors, increasing base frequency and memory speed, and switching to NVMe SSDs. This resulted in significant performance improvements for workloads like Kafka and the CSAM Scanning Tool. The Core Storage 2020 servers also moved to a single-socket Intel Xeon Gold 6210U processor, maintaining core count but increasing frequency and memory speed, with helium-filled SATA drives. Benchmarking showed substantial improvements in storage throughput, IOPS, and latency for ClickHouse workloads.