Facebook VP Slams Intel, AMD Server Chips

Facebook’s Vice President of Technical Operations says that new chips from AMD and Intel don’t deliver promised performance increases.

During an interview with GigaOm founder Om Malik at GigaOm’s Structure ‘09 conference, Facebook VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger was asked about unexpected problems the company had experienced while trying to keep up with Facebook’s growing population.

"The biggest thing (that) surprised us is ... less-than-anticipated performance gains from new micro-architectures -- so, new CPUs from guys like Intel and AMD. The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications," Heiliger told Malik. "And we're, literally in real time right now, trying to figure out why that is."

Heliger went on to declare that OEMs just “don’t get it.”

“You guys don't get it. To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient," said Heiliger. “And that doesn’t just mean putting in a really highly efficient power supply. It means going all the way down, basically starting at the wall outlet, all the way to the processor and figuring out how to optimize that power path,” he continued. “Google has done a great job designing and building its own servers for this kind of use.”

Check out the full video of the interview here.

Source : Tom's Hardware US