Facebook: New processors from Intel and AMD don't deliver

Jonathan Heiliger, vice president Facebook's technical operations, spoke about unexpected problems encountered with keeping Facebook running and lamented the "less-than-anticipated performance gains from new micro architectures." According to Heiliger, the performance improvements being touted to the press by the two top chip makers cannot be seen in their applications. Heiliger's comment carries weight because Facebook operates a large server farm, which as of April last year had more than 10,000 webservers.

Indeed, Heiliger had some harsh words for server manufacturers as well. The complaint here centers on them not creating cheap servers that are "super power-efficient." Frankly though, I see no reason why the likes of IBM and HP would want to build and sell such hardware in lieu of maintaining their fat profit margins. Of course, this was probably why Google opted to build its own servers using custom motherboards from Intel in the first place.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at ITworld

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