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.
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Hahahahaa... well Facebook "Vice President of Technical Operations", why don't you look at your software code and try to optimize it, for a change?
I'm using AMD and Intel CPUs for rendering and i can say, they are doing just great job with the new architectures. And.. it's really not appropriate for "vice president of t.o." not to mention nothing about the other bottleneck hardware (hard drives?). shame on them...
When Facebook get reliable servers and a website that doesn't just continually concatenate URLs then he can moan, in the meantime he should probably keep schtum.
Currently viewing...
http://www.facebook.com/video/?ref [...] p?ref=logo
Good work facebook!
HA HA HA...
I didn't think anyone can argue with the massive improvements in Nehalem for intense workloads. Or the reasonable performance of Istanbul.
But there is always one clown.
I think it says more about Jonathan Heiliger's grasp of the subject rather than AMD or Intel's chip designs.
Hi, I'm a VP and dont have a clue...
Google didnt choose to build its own whiteboxes because Intel or AMD didnt"deliver promised performance increases".
They did it for a number of factors including cutting costs, saving power and the need for cooling. Also they coded the website in such a way that made it less likely to go down in a physical server was to die.
Check out this link or just read below:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.ns [...] A4001C6703
"Another reason that Google builds its own servers is equally simple: it can save costs on power consumption.
Energy efficiency is a subject Hölzle speaks passionately about. About half of the energy that goes into a datacentre gets lost due to technology inefficiencies that are often easy to fix, he says.
The power supply to servers is one place that energy is unnecessarily lost. One-third of the electricity running through a typical power supply leaks out as heat, he says. That’s a waste of energy and also creates additional costs in the cooling required because of the heat added to a building, he says.
Rather than waste the electricity and incur the additional costs for cooling, Google has power supplies specially made that are 90% efficient.
“It’s not hard to do. That’s why to me it’s personally offensive [that standard power supplies aren’t as efficient]”, he says.
While he admits that ordering specially made power supplies is more expensive than buying standard
products, Google still ultimately saves money by conserving energy and cooling, he says. "