Shockbyte Consolidates Gaming Server Fleet And Cuts Power Draw With AMD CPU Migration

Melbourne-founded game server hosting provider, Shockbyte, has halved its server fleet and reduced power consumption by 30 per cent after migrating its infrastructure to AMD EPYC and Ryzen processors, while expanding into the United States market.

The company, which was founded in 2013 to host Minecraft servers and now supports more than 60 game titles, made the shift in partnership with hardware partner DiGiCOR and Supermicro. The transition has taken the company from more than 2,000 machines down to under 1,000 while increasing capacity.

From Minecraft Roots To Global Infrastructure

Shockbyte began as a Minecraft server hosting provider but has grown into a broader gaming infrastructure business operating across consumer and enterprise segments.

“The company started in 2013,” explained Mitch Smith, CEO and Founder of Shockbyte. “There was massive demand for Minecraft servers.”

One of Shockbyte’s early goals was to simplify the process of running a game server, even as the company tripled in size multiple years in a row. Shockbyte also set out to build a scalable platform using clustering to support a growing commercial business working with game studios.

“We work with Facepunch as Rust’s official dedicated server partner, which is one of the world’s most popular survival games. It has a huge community of players running their own dedicated servers to host massive, persistent worlds. We also work with Discord,” Smith added.

The consumer side of the business now supports around 65 games focused on player-owned servers. On the B2B side, the company operates Shockbyte for Game Studios as a cloud infrastructure provider.

The Challenge Of Demand Spikes

Scaling to meet unpredictable demand has been one of Shockbyte’s persistent challenges, particularly around game launches.

“Game launches have a massive spike for the first couple of weeks, and then it drops to barely 10 per cent of that initial player base,” Smith noted. “You need to be able to scale to support initial demand, but then start doing migrations to consolidate into fewer machines.”

That consolidation process can be disruptive for the players who remain, which pushed the company toward building its own clustered infrastructure and away from leasing bare metal servers from third parties.

Moving To AMD

Shockbyte’s shift toward AMD began around 2023 when it started running servers in its own data centres.

“For most of the time the company has been operating, we leased bare metal servers from third parties,” explained Liam Charles, Director of IT at Shockbyte. “Around 2023, we started looking into running servers in our own data centres. At the time, we were mostly Intel. This was when socket AM5 Ryzen CPUs had just launched.”

The company already had some experience with AMD hardware. “We had some Ryzen 3000 and 5000 processors in our portfolio,” Charles continued. “It was a minority at the time, but we’d had some of these machines for six plus years without even being rebooted. They worked perfectly.”

Hardware partner DiGiCOR helped Shockbyte identify AMD solutions that could meet its requirements for both density and single-core performance.

“Our engagement with Shockbyte began around the start of 2024,” recalled Dez Nguyen, Lead Systems Engineer at DiGiCOR. “We quickly identified unique offerings that would suit their workloads. There had been no enterprise offering available previously for gaming. This industry would traditionally run on consumer-based CPUs in custom-built rack mount systems.”

Supermicro’s MicroCloud platform, designed for the AMD Ryzen 7000 series, became a key part of the solution. “You could house eight nodes in a 3U rackmount,” Nguyen outlined. MicroCloud became the basis of Shockbyte’s initial bare metal deployment in Melbourne.

Performance Gains

Before adopting AMD CPUs, Shockbyte ran benchmarks to ensure the processors would meet its performance requirements.

“We test on single thread and multi-thread,” Charles described. “Our previous legacy builds averaged around 2,750 on a PassMark single-threaded benchmark. With our new AMD builds, we average 4,200 globally, which is an approximate increase of 53 per cent.”

“Single-threaded performance is the most important indicator for games and is our biggest focus when picking CPUs. We also do game-specific tests. Since switching to AMD from the Intel Xeon Es we used before, we saw at least 40 per cent increase on the single-thread performance, especially in Minecraft.”

The hardware rollout moved through several stages. Shockbyte’s first deployment used the Ryzen 7700 processor before progressing to the EPYC 4464P, which is roughly equivalent to the Ryzen 7900X with 24 threads but supports more RAM at 192GB.

“Most of our fleet now uses the AMD EPYC 4464P,” Charles continued. “Then we moved onto the 4545P, and our most recent deployment is the AMD EPYC 9555P. Those are 64-core CPUs with 1.1TB of RAM each, which really allows us to bump up the density.”

“With CPUs that are high core count you often trade single-thread performance for more cores. But the 9555P gives the best of every world. You have a lot of CPU cores to do multi-thread workloads, but the single-thread performance is also excellent. You can run every thread hot and still outperform just about everything else.”

Zero Complaints

The gamer experience has been a central measure of success for the migration.

“Our overall goal is to make it smooth and frictionless to run a game server,” Charles commented. “Even a slight micro-stutter is enough to cause complaints.”

Shockbyte also needs sufficient performance headroom to compensate for games that have not been fully optimised at release, particularly early betas. “Ensuring our hardware can brute force out of these issues means the experience is flawless, even if the game is imperfect. Since switching, we have not had complaints about performance from customers or partners.”

Density And Power Savings

The AMD migration has changed Shockbyte’s data centre economics. The company was previously limited to 128GB of RAM per system. With EPYC 9000 Series Server CPUs, it can now scale to 1.5TB.

“We used to have over 2,000 machines, and now we have just under a thousand,” Charles noted. “The overall power saving was significant. We’re constantly growing, yet we’ve cut our power draw by a lot to host more servers.”

The numbers bear this out. Shockbyte’s legacy builds averaged 0.93W per GB of memory. Its current AMD builds average around 0.65W per GB of memory – a 30 per cent reduction in power draw to host the same amount of capacity.

US Expansion

Shockbyte is now directing its AMD EPYC 9555P deployments toward expansion in the United States.

“Expanding our US footprint is where we see most of our growth now,” Charles outlined. “The 9555Ps are almost exclusively going to America. We have our newest deployment in Dallas, Texas. We plan to scale that to meet demand.”

Data centre constraints are making the density gains from AMD hardware particularly valuable. “It’s harder to get data centre space or power allocation. Being able to consolidate into two racks what would have required six to eight racks allows us to make the most out of what is available.”

The wider Shockbyte fleet now runs on Ryzen or EPYC 4004 and 4005 CPUs, with the latest deployment built on AMD EPYC 9555P servers and more on order.

Alexey Navolokin, General Manager of Sales for APAC at AMD, pointed to Shockbyte’s deployment as an example of how gaming infrastructure providers balance competing demands.

“Gaming infrastructure providers require a unique balance of performance, scalability and efficiency to support dynamic workloads and growing communities from around the world,” Navolokin commented. “Shockbyte’s adoption of AMD EPYC Server CPUs and AMD Ryzen processors demonstrates how high-performance compute can help service providers deliver user experiences while improving infrastructure density and operational efficiency as they scale.”

“Like the old adage about IBM, you’re not going to get fired if you buy AMD now,” Charles concluded. “Switching to AMD EPYC Server CPUs has been a no-brainer. Gamers tend to be savvy about what they use. Our customers know exactly what they want, and it’s AMD.”

For more information visit shockbyte.com.

Last Updated on June 29, 2026 by Nick Ross