Cloudflare's Gen 13 servers introduce AMD EPYC™ Turin 9965 processors and a transition to 100 GbE networking to meet growing traffic demands. In this technical deep dive, we explain the engineering rationale behind each major component selection.

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Cloudflare's Gen 13 server design features the AMD EPYC Turin 9965 192-core processor, 768 GB DDR5-6400 memory, 24 TB PCIe 5.0 NVMe storage, and dual 100 GbE networking — a major upgrade from Gen 12. The post details the engineering rationale behind each component choice: the shift away from large L3 cache (enabled by the FL2 Rust rewrite), memory configuration trade-offs, the jump from 25 GbE to 100 GbE due to bandwidth saturation risk, PCIe encryption support, a 1300W Titanium PSU, and expanded PCIe accelerator support. Gen 13 delivers up to 2x throughput, 50% better performance-per-watt, and 60% higher rack-level throughput while maintaining operational simplicity and supply chain resilience through dual-vendor NIC strategy.

Inside Gen 13: how we built our most powerful server yet

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