To: DavidRG who wrote (144476 ) 3/17/2018 4:36:49 PM From: VinnieBagOfDonuts 12 RecommendationsRecommended By
Read Replies (1) | Respond to What a great article on how Cloudflare is moving to ARM server chips like Q's Centriq. I re-posted the last half or the story with some highlightsQuitting Intel planning a massive architectural change. The company will soon start deploying ARM servers in its data centers, Prince said, expecting that the alternative to x86 will be cheaper to buy and to keep running due to their lower power requirements and to the nature of Cloudflare’s workload.already moved away from Intel SSDs after finding the performance wasn’t enough for its needs. (All Cloudflare servers use SSDs to cache data from the web sites it protects.) “I’d give better-than-even odds that by Q4 this year we will no longer spend any money with Intel,” Prince told us.“We think we're now at a point where we can go one hundred percent to ARM. In our analysis, we found that even if Intel gave us the chips for free, it would still make sense to switch to ARM, because the power efficiency is so much better.”#QualcommCentriq ARM server chips. On @Cloudflare 's workloads we're seeing equivalent performance to Intel at half the power.November 8, 2017 Lower-power chips are also good to have in the cities where its servers may be deployed in older and less efficient facilities. The only metric we spend time thinking about is cores per Watt and requests per Watt.” The ARM-based Qualcomm Centriq processors perform very well by that measure. “ They've got very high core counts at very lower power utilization in Gen 1, and in Gen 2 they're just going to widen their lead.”started shipping Centriq, aimed at hyper-scale cloud platforms, last November. Microsoft, for example, said last year that the architecture could one day power half of its entire workload . Cloudflare team (which includes former Intel engineers) didn’t initially expect ARM processors to perform so well for its needs , especially with the open source software the service is built on. “They started testing the workloads , and they were just blown away. It was so much easier than we thought it would be. Performance is already better, and the power performance is just incredible. ”datacenterknowledge.com
