Cloudflare has launched its Gen 13 server architecture, utilizing 192-core AMD EPYC Turin processors and a redesigned Rust-based software stack to double traffic capacity while improving energy efficiency.

Key Points

• The Gen 13 servers feature 192-core AMD EPYC Turin 9965 processors, 768 GB of DDR5 memory, and 24 TB of PCIe 5.0 NVMe storage.
• Cloudflare transitioned from cache-heavy hardware to a parallel-processing model, rewriting its FL2 software stack to optimize memory access patterns.
• The new hardware delivers approximately 60% more capacity per rack without increasing total power consumption compared to the previous Gen 12 generation.
• New features include integrated PCIe encryption hardware support and enhanced thermal management for high-performance PCIe accelerators.
• The transition allows the company to maintain low latency targets despite using processors with significantly smaller L3 caches than previous models.

Why it Matters

This architectural shift demonstrates a move toward software-defined hardware optimization, allowing infrastructure to scale through parallelism rather than relying on expensive, cache-heavy processors. By improving performance-per-watt, Cloudflare can increase its global edge capacity while managing the rising energy demands of modern internet traffic.