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They probably should have disclosed the relation (they disclosed that Intel, Cavium, and Qualcomm sent engineering samples to them), but accusing Vlad Krasnov o

by dchest 8y ago

They probably should have disclosed the relation (they disclosed that Intel, Cavium, and Qualcomm sent engineering samples to them), but accusing Vlad Krasnov of writing a PR piece for Qualcomm in the form of blog posts describing his work is over the top.

eastdakota 8y ago
Exactly. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, Vlad used to work for Intel. And, I think, could rightly be described as an Intel fanboy. And, when we began testing Centriq, said something to the effect of: "This is a waste of time. There is no way this will be better than Intel's chips." And then was surprised when they were in many, but not all, cases — which his blog thoroughly spelled out. One thing that may not be apparent from the outside is that it's the engineers who run the blog at Cloudflare, not our PR or marketing team. Vlad's post wasn't screened by anyone in PR or marketing ahead of time. I didn't read it until it was on the blog. We encourage engineers on our team to talk about interesting work they're doing. We see it as a recruiting tool, not a sales and marketing tool. I think that's why the content of the blog is so genuinely interesting and valued by an engineering audience. It is correct that Qualcomm has a very small investment in Cloudflare. We've not hidden that; it's on the front page of our website. Other strategic companies like Google and Microsoft have also made investments. I'm sure that our relationship with Qualcomm got us a bit earlier access to test equipment than we'd have had without it. If we do switch to their platform, it may help us get better pricing though, in the case of the blog, Vlad was comparing list prices with list prices. I don't know, but I'd be surprised if Vlad knew the actual pricing our Infrastructure team has negotiated with either Intel or Qualcomm. I'm genuinely not sure whether Vlad even knew that Qualcomm was a small investor. It happened before he joined and it's not something that comes up internally. Should Vlad have disclosed the investment? Perhaps, though I doubt it crossed his mind and, again, we didn't run his blog post through a central marketing department whose job would be to think of such things. Frankly, doing so would make our blog the sort of boring, marketing-driven blog that no one reads which would defeat its purpose. As for the shut down, the team at Qualcomm gave us an early heads up that the sever chip business would likely not stay within the company as Qualcomm goes through restructuring. I don't know what will happen with it, but I suspect it will get spun out into some independent company. If that happens, that independent company won't have any investment in Cloudflare, at which point if their chips continue to perform well for our application perhaps we can put this issue to rest. As for the future, if sufficiently capitalized, I actually think having the server chip business as an independent company will be a terrific outcome — allowing it to innovate quickly without the burdens and distractions of Qualcomm's core business. (And, perhaps, we can get them to rethink the name. "Centriq" has always sounded incredibly effete to me.) As others have pointed out, even if the Centriq line doesn't survive, there are several other companies working on ARM-based server chips. While, to date, Centriq has performed better than these other ARM servers have in our tests, inevitably that gap will close. We continue to believe that, for our application — where requests are atomic and performance is largely driven by core count, and where we are more sensitive to power costs because we need to operate out of old, inefficient but central and highly connected data centers — an ARM-based solution will win the day. Does that mean ARM-based servers are better for every task? Of course not. But they have proven to be for ours. To think we'd be biased because of a small investment defies logic. The amount we spend annually on CapEx for CPUs or OpEx to operate those CPUs dwarfs Qualcomm's investment. They don't have a board seat, information rights, or any other way to know what's going on inside Cloudflare or influence us. We're highly rational and data-driven. If Intel makes an affordable, high-core-count processor that operates efficiently, awesome! We'd love to buy it. Until then, I am happy that for the first time in a long time there is starting to be real competition in the server chip market. That's good for everyone, even, probably, over the long term, Intel.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > Exactly. And for full disclosure, Vlad used to work for Intel. He did disclose that though, in the first article: > Intel supplied us with an engineering sample of their Skylake based Purley platform back in August 2016, to give us time to evaluate it and optimize our software. As a former Intel Architect, who did a lot of work on Skylake (as well as Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Icelake), I really enjoy that. (emphasis mine)

by dchest 8y ago

eastdakota 8y ago

Exactly. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, Vlad used to work for Intel. And, I think, could rightly be described as an Intel fanboy. And, when we began testing Centriq, said something to the effect of: "This is a waste of time. There is no way this will be better than Intel's chips." And then was surprised when they were in many, but not all, cases — which his blog thoroughly spelled out. One thing that may not be apparent from the outside is that it's the engineers who run the blog at Cloudflare, not our PR or marketing team. Vlad's post wasn't screened by anyone in PR or marketing ahead of time. I didn't read it until it was on the blog. We encourage engineers on our team to talk about interesting work they're doing. We see it as a recruiting tool, not a sales and marketing tool. I think that's why the content of the blog is so genuinely interesting and valued by an engineering audience. It is correct that Qualcomm has a very small investment in Cloudflare. We've not hidden that; it's on the front page of our website. Other strategic companies like Google and Microsoft have also made investments. I'm sure that our relationship with Qualcomm got us a bit earlier access to test equipment than we'd have had without it. If we do switch to their platform, it may help us get better pricing though, in the case of the blog, Vlad was comparing list prices with list prices. I don't know, but I'd be surprised if Vlad knew the actual pricing our Infrastructure team has negotiated with either Intel or Qualcomm. I'm genuinely not sure whether Vlad even knew that Qualcomm was a small investor. It happened before he joined and it's not something that comes up internally. Should Vlad have disclosed the investment? Perhaps, though I doubt it crossed his mind and, again, we didn't run his blog post through a central marketing department whose job would be to think of such things. Frankly, doing so would make our blog the sort of boring, marketing-driven blog that no one reads which would defeat its purpose. As for the shut down, the team at Qualcomm gave us an early heads up that the sever chip business would likely not stay within the company as Qualcomm goes through restructuring. I don't know what will happen with it, but I suspect it will get spun out into some independent company. If that happens, that independent company won't have any investment in Cloudflare, at which point if their chips continue to perform well for our application perhaps we can put this issue to rest. As for the future, if sufficiently capitalized, I actually think having the server chip business as an independent company will be a terrific outcome — allowing it to innovate quickly without the burdens and distractions of Qualcomm's core business. (And, perhaps, we can get them to rethink the name. "Centriq" has always sounded incredibly effete to me.) As others have pointed out, even if the Centriq line doesn't survive, there are several other companies working on ARM-based server chips. While, to date, Centriq has performed better than these other ARM servers have in our tests, inevitably that gap will close. We continue to believe that, for our application — where requests are atomic and performance is largely driven by core count, and where we are more sensitive to power costs because we need to operate out of old, inefficient but central and highly connected data centers — an ARM-based solution will win the day. Does that mean ARM-based servers are better for every task? Of course not. But they have proven to be for ours. To think we'd be biased because of a small investment defies logic. The amount we spend annually on CapEx for CPUs or OpEx to operate those CPUs dwarfs Qualcomm's investment. They don't have a board seat, information rights, or any other way to know what's going on inside Cloudflare or influence us. We're highly rational and data-driven. If Intel makes an affordable, high-core-count processor that operates efficiently, awesome! We'd love to buy it. Until then, I am happy that for the first time in a long time there is starting to be real competition in the server chip market. That's good for everyone, even, probably, over the long term, Intel.

masklinn 8y ago
> Exactly. And for full disclosure, Vlad used to work for Intel. He did disclose that though, in the first article: > Intel supplied us with an engineering sample of their Skylake based Purley platform back in August 2016, to give us time to evaluate it and optimize our software. As a former Intel Architect, who did a lot of work on Skylake (as well as Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Icelake), I really enjoy that. (emphasis mine)