It's not so simple. What kind of engineering support, hardware support, optimizing support did CloudFlare get in exchange for a submarine PR piece? That can easily outweigh the performance-per-watt advantage that the blog touted. Qualcomm is not exactly known for being forthcoming with application support for any random company and that includes things like patent licensing costs.
It's unethical to not disclose that QualComm invested in CloudFlare.
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.
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.
> 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.
You guys had an undisclosed (in the piece) investment from Qualcomm and then touted their products without clearly stating conflicts.
It's:
* a PR piece -- you guys are making the case for your/qualcomm's tech on a blog, designed for public relations for Cloudflare
* you didn't disclose serious conflicts of interest that taint the conclusion of Qualcomm's tech being better
You might not be the NYT, and you may not have had a PR firm pushing you, but it's not morally different.
For the record, I was very interested in there being a real competitor to intel/amd in the server processing space. Now that the only real win they have is tainted, that's seriously disappointing.
Great, but you are not a disinterested source on this.
You are an insider (C-level exec) who allowed someone to write a potentially conflicted PR piece without disclosing that the beneficiary of that piece has a non-trivial investment in your company.
I don't even see a clear disclaimer that says "Qualcomm is an investor in Cloudflare" in the blog post.
The SEC doesn't usually like a technical distinction on potentially-material information (huge win for Centriq!) about something that could move QCOM done underhandedly by a company that didn't disclose that it received a lot of investment by QCOM.
per the comments section, it appears that the engineer is open sourcing or maybe has already open sourced (discussion was 6 months ago) their testing setup so perhaps someone can check his work?
Maybe the lack of notice of investment should have been noticed earlier (or perhaps should be amended to include), but I'd assume an engineer isn't aware of details of who is providing funding (don't work for them, though, so maybe they do). The engineer specifies the metric that matters most to them is long term cost (performance per watt) so with that, I don't get the feeling that their conclusion is flawed when comparing ARM vs Intel in consumer space. We host a few pre-core ASP.NET web applications so I'm fairly certain we wouldn't come to the same conclusion due to use cases. I will say, though, based on the Bloomberg article vs the Cloudflare one, I'm a bit bummed as it seems like long term it'd be a good avenue where applicable and losing a competitor is unfortunate.
It's unethical to not disclose that QualComm invested in CloudFlare.