A tour inside Cloudflare's G9 servers

The parent post quoted RPS is doubled on Gen9 at 1.74x power consumption resulting from doubling cores compared to Gen8. It did not say what RPS we're looking at, but from the previous post about Falkor [1] I guess it's safe to assume that we're talking about nginx.

Gen8 is the Skylake server with 16,311 RPS at 165W (99 RPS/W), while Falkor is 15,393 at 72W (214 RPS/W). Calculated Gen9 number is about 32,622 RPS at 287W (114 RPS/W). Please note that power numbers are not directly comparable because the parent post quoted CPU TDP but [1] used actual power readings from BMC. Take it with a huge grain of salt. It would be nice if Cloudflare could do a comparable benchmark though :)

With the numbers above, it means power efficiency increased by 15% from Skylake to the custom chip. Falkor is still 88% more efficient. But Intel remains the only option if you want best performance density.

The interesting question is now that Qualcomm quit ARM64 server market, how does Cloudflare plan to continue the migration to ARM64?

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/