Gaming server provider Shockbyte has significantly reduced its data center footprint after switching from Intel to AMD processors, cutting its machine count from more than 2,000 to under 1,000 while also lowering power consumption.
Shockbyte, known for hosting Minecraft servers since its founding in 2013, has grown to support around 65 games on the consumer side and now operates a separate business unit called Shockbyte for Game Studios, providing cloud infrastructure for game developers. The company works with Facepunch as the official dedicated server partner for Rust, and also supports Discord.
The company began exploring in house data centers around 2023, moving away from leased bare metal servers from third parties. At the time, its infrastructure was mostly Intel based, though it had already been running a small number of AMD Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series processors for years without issue.
According to Liam Charles, Director of IT at Shockbyte, single thread CPU performance was the main factor behind the shift to AMD. The company’s legacy builds averaged around 2,750 on a PassMark single thread benchmark, while its current AMD builds average 4,200, an increase of roughly 53 percent. Charles said switching from Intel Xeon E processors resulted in at least a 40 percent single thread performance gain, particularly noticeable in Minecraft.
Hardware partner DiGiCOR helped Shockbyte identify suitable AMD platforms, starting with a high density Supermicro MicroCloud system built around AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, which allowed eight nodes to fit in a 3U rack mount enclosure. This became the basis for Shockbyte’s first in house bare metal deployment in Melbourne, Australia.
Shockbyte’s hardware has since evolved through several stages, starting with the Ryzen 7700 before moving to the AMD EPYC 4464P, which offers 24 threads and support for up to 192 GB of RAM. The company later adopted the EPYC 4545P, and its most recent deployment uses the AMD EPYC 9555P, a 64 core CPU paired with up to 1.1 TB of RAM per unit.
Charles noted that the EPYC 9555P offers a balance that’s typically hard to find, delivering strong multi-thread performance for running many game servers on one machine while still maintaining high single-thread performance, which matters most for smooth gameplay.
The move to AMD also improved power efficiency. Shockbyte’s legacy builds averaged 0.93 W per GB of memory, while current AMD builds average around 0.65 W per GB, a reduction of about 30 percent while hosting the same capacity.
With AMD CPUs enabling higher density per rack, Shockbyte is now focusing its growth on the US market, with its newest deployment based in Dallas, Texas built on EPYC 9555P servers. Charles said the ability to consolidate what previously required six to eight racks into just two has made expansion easier amid tighter data center space and power allocation in the US.
