Launching Cloudflare’s Gen 13 servers: trading cache for cores for 2x edge compute performance
Summary
Cloudflare announces Gen 13 servers based on AMD EPYC Turin with significantly higher core counts and a tradeoff in cache per core. The post details how Cloudflare transitioned to FL2 (a Rust-based rewrite of core request handling) to unlock 2x edge throughput by reducing cache dependency, and it discusses performance counters, latency implications, and resource-management strategies like PQOS. The result is a compelling case of hardware-software co-design enabling higher density and throughput at the edge while maintaining SLAs.