Cloudflare’s Gen 13 servers lean on more CPU cores in parallel instead of chasing bigger caches, which is a pretty clean reminder that software tuning can matter as much as hardware changes.
“More cores” is only a win if the hot path stops fighting itself — past a few dozen cores you start paying in lock contention and cache-line ping‑pong unless you’ve pushed things toward per-core sharding and mostly lock-free data structures.
I’d skip the kirupa.com detour here and just point at the core tradeoff: Cloudflare’s basically choosing software architecture (parallelism + locality) over “buy bigger caches and pray,” which is a very different kind of tuning.
