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

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 servers

05:04 — Doubling compute power while cutting cache by 83%

06:54 — The journey to choosing the right CPU

10:04 — Scratchpad vs bookshelf: cache and memory explained

12:08 — Why 192 cores won over 128 cores