By: anon (spam.delete.delete@this.this.spam.com), October 10, 2018 9:39 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
nobody in particular (nobody.delete@this.nowhe.re) on October 10, 2018 8:55 am wrote:
> More info here
>
> "In essence, requests per second (RPS) per Watt is a critical metric that Qualcomm’s
> ARM64 46 core Falkor chip had a big advantage over Intel’s Skylake 4116. Embracing
> the value of optionality and market competition, we made some noise.
>
> Intel proposed to co-innovate with us an off-roadmap 24-core Xeon Gold CPU specifically made for our workload
> offering considerable value in Performance per Watt. For this generation, we continue using Intel as system
> solutions are widely available while we’re working on realizing ARM64’s benefits to production."
>
> Looks like Centriq was far less of a done deal for Cloudflare than many assumed.
The thing is that custom 24-core is probably less efficient than the normal SKUs.
But system power consumption matters so much more that 2.1 or 1.9 GHz at 150W TDP is essentially irrelevant. Halving the socket count is the win.
Intel gets to sell chips that otherwise wouldn't have made the cut as 24-core part and Cloudflare gets 24 cores for significantly less than 5000$.
Centriq isn't even losing on CPU efficiency, just density. 46 thread Centriq vs 48 thread (2x2x12) Skylake was fairly close with a massive CPU power consumption advantage for Centriq. 46 (or even 48) vs 96 it's not even close. At that point they can just disable boost to increase the efficiency and it'll still be faster.
Not offering dual socket really doesn't seem to work out.
> More info here
>
> "In essence, requests per second (RPS) per Watt is a critical metric that Qualcomm’s
> ARM64 46 core Falkor chip had a big advantage over Intel’s Skylake 4116. Embracing
> the value of optionality and market competition, we made some noise.
>
> Intel proposed to co-innovate with us an off-roadmap 24-core Xeon Gold CPU specifically made for our workload
> offering considerable value in Performance per Watt. For this generation, we continue using Intel as system
> solutions are widely available while we’re working on realizing ARM64’s benefits to production."
>
> Looks like Centriq was far less of a done deal for Cloudflare than many assumed.
The thing is that custom 24-core is probably less efficient than the normal SKUs.
But system power consumption matters so much more that 2.1 or 1.9 GHz at 150W TDP is essentially irrelevant. Halving the socket count is the win.
Intel gets to sell chips that otherwise wouldn't have made the cut as 24-core part and Cloudflare gets 24 cores for significantly less than 5000$.
Centriq isn't even losing on CPU efficiency, just density. 46 thread Centriq vs 48 thread (2x2x12) Skylake was fairly close with a massive CPU power consumption advantage for Centriq. 46 (or even 48) vs 96 it's not even close. At that point they can just disable boost to increase the efficiency and it'll still be faster.
Not offering dual socket really doesn't seem to work out.