So if I’m understanding correctly, the FL2 rewrite reduces latency by 70%. But the CPU “upgrade” increased latency by 50% from baseline. So… it’s not any faster for customers, just higher performance/watt for Cloudflare.

And this is against the alternative of potentially using the new runtime code on the old hardware which would have reduced request serving latency by up to 70%, which Cloudflare has decided not to do.

I like these transparent blog posts and appreciate them. However, essentially as a customer we are being told 100% of the savings is being eaten up by Cloudflare and the customer gets no tangible benefit. This was an engineering and management decision.

Oddly it’s a bad look for AMD too. It gives clear insight into where hyperscaler’s priorities are at in general. This is why customers are slowly repatriating their hosting services off cloud.