Inside Cloudflare's Gen 13 Servers: Trading Cache for Cores

About this episode

The episode discusses Cloudflare's 13th generation servers, focusing on the trade-off between cache and compute cores and the impact on performance.

In this episode of This Week in NET, JQ Lau and Victor Hwang from our Network & Infrastructure Strategy team walk us through Cloudflare's 13th generation of servers — the machines that power a significant part of the internet across 330+ cities worldwide. The Gen 13 program doubled compute density by jumping from 96 to 192 cores, but that came with an 83% drop in L3 cache. The team explains how a bold hardware bet, combined with Cloudflare's FL2 Rust-based software rewrite, turned that trade-off into a win across throughput, latency, and power efficiency. From counterintuitive fan physics to credit card pen tests on chassis intrusion switches, this conversation covers the full stack: CPUs, memory, storage, networking, security, and what's next — including post-quantum readiness at the hardware layer. Mentioned blog posts: Launching Cloudflare's Gen 13 servers: trading cache for cores for 2x edge compute performance Inside Gen 13: how we built our most powerful server yet Timestamps 00:53 — Blog recap: what Cloudflare announced (including agents can now actually create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy) 03:52 — From Gen 11 to Gen 13: the evolution of Cloudflare's…

People in this episode

Guests: JQ Lau, Victor Hwang

Topics covered

• Cloudflare
• Gen 13 servers
• compute density
• hardware and software co-design
• power efficiency
• latency
• throughput

Keywords

• compute density
• L3 cache
• CPU
• memory
• storage
• networking
• security
• post-quantum readiness

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cloudflare

Products: Gen 13 servers, FL2, Rust

Places: 330+ cities