How to Pick the Right Hardware for HFT¶

This is a very common question and something you probably need to know right away.

The answer depends on your budget and exchange setup, but if speed matters—and you’re not looking to blow your trading principal on FPGAs—here’s what you should focus on:

First, check your data center’s power limits and go for a 1U chassis if possible. Hosting and connectivity vendors charge per U of rack space, and today’s hardware is powerful enough that you rarely need anything bigger.

Next, choose the right network card—this is where microseconds are won or lost. You need a NIC that bypasses the OS kernel to send and receive packets as fast as possible. Solarflare and Mellanox are the main options, and we prefer Solarflare for its amazing and powerful API. Features like PIO and CTPIO completely bypass the normal transmission path, cutting latency even more. Also, make sure your NIC has at least two ports to handle both A and B feeds from exchanges.

For the CPU, cache beats clock speed. Low-latency trading isn’t about crunching numbers—it’s about moving data fast. L3 cache is ~5x faster than RAM, so the more cache your CPU has, the better. Get the processor with the biggest cache you can afford within your power budget. Core count and clock speed rarely matter as much.

The right hardware won’t fix a bad strategy, but it will make sure your orders hit the market fast.

If you’ve built a low-latency setup before, what did you prioritize?