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Cloudflare launches Gen 13 servers with 192-core AMD EPYC processors, doubling throughput and improving efficiency by 50%
Cloudflare · releaseplatformperformance · blog.cloudflare.com ↗

Gen 13 Server Hardware Refresh

Cloudflare has unveiled Gen 13, a major hardware refresh designed to support the deployment of FL2, the company's Rust-based rewrite of its core request handling layer. The new servers feature significantly upgraded components across CPU, memory, storage, and networking, delivering substantial improvements in performance and efficiency.

Key Specifications and Improvements

The Gen 13 servers are built around the AMD EPYC 9965 Turin processor with 192 cores, compared to the 96-core Genoa-X in Gen 12. Additional hardware upgrades include:

  • Memory: 768 GB DDR5-6400 (2x capacity increase)
  • Storage: 24 TB PCIe 5.0 NVMe across three drives (1.5x capacity)
  • Networking: Dual 100 GbE ports (4x bandwidth increase from 25 GbE)
  • PCIe Encryption: Hardware support for both memory and PCIe encryption
  • Power: 1300W titanium-grade power supply

Performance Metrics

Gen 13 delivers measurable improvements in key operational areas:

  • Up to 2x throughput compared to Gen 12 while maintaining latency SLAs
  • 50% improvement in performance-per-watt, reducing data center expansion costs
  • 60% higher throughput per rack at constant power budget
  • Scales nearly linearly with core count due to FL2's improved cache efficiency

Engineering Rationale

The choice of the 192-core 9965 over other Turin candidates (128-core 9755 and 160-core 9845) reflects a fundamental shift in Cloudflare's workload characteristics. FL2 is significantly less dependent on large L3 caches compared to the previous FL1 architecture—the 9965's 2 MB L3 cache per core represents an 83% reduction from Gen 12's 12 MB per core, yet delivers superior aggregate performance. This architectural change, combined with TCO analysis and operational simplicity goals (fewer high-density nodes to manage), made the 192-core configuration the optimal choice.

Deployment Impact

The Gen 13 rollout supports Cloudflare's infrastructure modernization strategy, enabling better resource utilization across its global network. The efficiency gains directly translate to reduced data center expansion costs and lower operational overhead, while the performance improvements position the platform to handle growing traffic demands with the new FL2 software stack.