Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

This post details Cloudflare's adoption of AMD EPYC processors for its Gen X server platform, marking a departure from Intel components. It highlights performance improvements such as up to 36% more requests handled, a ~50% decrease in L3 cache miss rate, and up to 50% decrease in NGINX p99 latency, all while using a CPU with a 25% lower TDP per core. Benchmarks for cryptography, compression, regular expressions, and LuaJIT were conducted to select the AMD 2nd Gen EPYC 7642. The post also discusses performance tuning with AMD and the utilization of AMD's Secure Memory Encryption (SME) feature for RAM encryption without significant performance degradation.