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 blog claims custom Xeon "offering considerable value in Performance per Watt".

Then adds that the custom Xeon increases "RPS by 200% from doubling the amount of cores" and increases "the power consumption by 174% from increasing the CPUs TDP from 85W to 150W each".
Yes the number of cores is doubled, but the frequency drops from 2.1GHz to 1.9GHz. So the RPS is only 181%, not "200%".

So performance per watt is only 4% better, and far from the 2x gap offered by Falkor.