Hardware - The Cloudflare Blog

Measuring Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost

October 05, 2021 1:58PM

Contemporary x86 processors implement some variants of Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost. We decided to learn about the implications of these two technologies....

Sung Park

ARMs Race: Ampere Altra takes on the AWS Graviton2

March 11, 2021 12:00PM

Hardware Data Center Cloudflare Network Partners

A comparison between the Ampere Altra and the AWS Graviton2, the two ARM Neoverse N1-based processors....

Sung Park

An introduction to three-phase power and PDUs

December 04, 2020 2:05PM

Hardware Data Center Network Edge Edge Computing

This blog is a quick Electrical Engineering 101 session going over specifically how 3-phase PDUs work, along with some good practices on how we use them...

Rob Dinh

ASICs at the Edge

November 27, 2020 1:00PM

Network Hardware Deep Dive

At Cloudflare, we pride ourselves in our global network that spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. To accelerate all that traffic through our network, there are multiple technologies at play. So let’s have a look at one of the cornerstones that makes all of this work....

Tom Strickx

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

November 20, 2020 12:00PM

Hardware Genx Kafka Kubernetes ClickHouse

A refresh of the hardware that Cloudflare uses to run analytics provided big efficiency improvements....

Brian Bassett

November 17, 2020 12:00PM

Anchoring Trust: A Hardware Secure Boot Story

As a security company, we pride ourselves on finding innovative ways to protect our platform to, in turn, protect the data of our customers. Part of this approach is implementing progressive methods in protecting our hardware at scale....

By

Derek Chamorro
, Ryan Chow

Security , Hardware , Encryption , Data Center , Cloudflare Network

March 02, 2020 1:00PM

When Bloom filters don't bloom

Last month finally I had an opportunity to use Bloom filters. I became fascinated with the promise of this data structure, but I quickly realized it had some drawbacks. This blog post is the tale of my brief love affair with Bloom filters....

By

Marek Majkowski

Deep Dive , Hardware , Optimization , Programming , Tools

March 01, 2020 1:00PM

Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

Looking back at this week's posts on the design, specifications, and performance of Cloudflare’s Gen X servers using AMD CPUs. Every server can run every service. This architectural decision has helped us achieve higher efficiency across the Cloudflare network....

By

Nitin Rao

EPYC , AMD , Gen X , Cache , Hardware

February 28, 2020 2:00PM

Securing Memory at EPYC Scale

At Cloudflare, we encrypt data both in transit (on the network) and at rest (on the disk). Both practices address some of the most common vectors used to exfiltrate information and these measures serve to protect sensitive data from attackers but, what about data currently in use?...

By

Derek Chamorro
, Brian Bassett

EPYC , Hardware , Data Center , Cloudflare Network , Security

February 27, 2020 2:00PM

Gen X Performance Tuning

We have partnered with AMD to get the best performance out of this processor and today, we are highlighting our tuning efforts that led to an additional 6% performance. Thermal design power (TDP) and dynamic power, amongst others, play a critical role when tuning a system....

By

Sung Park

EPYC , AMD , Hardware , Gen X

February 26, 2020 12:00PM

Impact of Cache Locality

Our Gen X servers process more requests per second per core than our previous fleet. The AMD 2nd Gen EPYC 7642 processor’s large L3 cache minimizes L3 cache misses, and the time-savings add up quickly....

By

Sung Park

Hardware , Data Center , Cloudflare Network , Partners , EPYC

February 25, 2020 2:00PM

An EPYC trip to Rome: AMD is Cloudflare's 10th-generation Edge server CPU

As we started looking at production ready systems to power our Gen X solution, we took a long look at what is available to us in the market today and we’ve made our decision. We’re moving on from Gen 9's 48-core setup of dual socket Intel Xeon Platinum 6162's to a 48-core single socket AMD EPYC 7642...

By

Rob Dinh

Hardware , Cloudflare Network , Data Center , EPYC , Partners

February 24, 2020 1:00PM

Cloudflare’s Gen X: Servers for an Accelerated Future

We designed and built Cloudflare’s network to be able to grow capacity quickly and inexpensively; to allow every server, in every city, to run every service; and to allow us to shift customers and traffic across our network efficiently....

By

Nitin Rao
, John Graham-Cumming

Hardware , Cloudflare Network , Data Center , Partners , Speed & Reliability