Saturday, June 27, 2009

Facebook Calls Out Intel, AMD

Facebook has more than 200 million active users, and as you might imagine, keeping all of their information available (never mind the stuff pertaining to less involved people) requires some serious hardware. Yet according to the company's vice president of technical operations, certain manufacturers are falling short of the mark.

Jonathan Heiliger was interviewed onstage during GigaOm's Structure 09 conference, and in response to a question about unexpected problems, said, "The biggest thing (that) surprised us is . . . less-than-anticipated performance gains from new microarchitectures -- 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."

Stephen Lawson reports that Heiliger also stated, "Google has done a great job designing and building its own servers for this kind of use."

So we seem to have Facebook either really lighting a fire under its suppliers, or perhaps leaning towards the DIY route. And of course, both alternatives could lead to improved performance for less money.

Finally, a third possibility would involve some sort of lawsuit, but it sounds like Facebook is more at a stage of identifying issues than seeking reparation.




Source : www.webpronews.com

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