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.
Did I miss something? Google doesn't build their own processors. They still use Intel or AMD (or IBM) processors. They just design and put together the server.
Maybe what he really means to complain about is that his people don't design their servers well enough, and he wants Google's people to design his servers instead.
I could have sworn that's what they're in the buisness to do.
Facebook doesnt owe us anything.
"The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications"
Maybe he should try optimizing his applications for the microarcitecture instead of expecting the microarchitecture be designed to fit his needs perfectly.
Yeah that would likely be the issue. Todays server processors have many cores, if you want your server application to get a speed boost it is time you talk to your engineers working on facebook to start optimizing facebook for many processors. Of course they need to make sure any API's and server software they use is multi-core friendly too. Maybe they can start laying the blame somewhere else.
Did I miss something? Google doesn't build their own processors. They still use Intel or AMD (or IBM) processors. They just design and put together the server.
Maybe what he really means to complain about is that his people don't design their servers well enough, and he wants Google's people to design his servers instead.
clearly they should create a new line of processors specifically for facebook.
alternatively, stfu and optimize.
The new Nehalem Xeon's are configured for dual processor sytsems and are 4 cores at the moment (I think). Soon there will be 16 thread executions per processor (8 cores, 8 HT). If programmers know how to use them they are VERY VERY fast. With cutting edge systems you make due with what you have and plopping core i7's in server environments could be a bad choice.
I'm sure this guy is simply ignorant (not his fault, I blame his staff and hiring). Go buy some low power xeons, restructure slow parts of your code, and stop whining!
I'd also like to point out when a company, for example, says something is up to 50% more efficient, they mean it's up to 50% more efficient.
Just because facebook code written by a highschool grad doesnt fully utilize an architecture doesnt mean the performance isnt there.
Someone needs to explain to this jerkoff that facebook is on its way out, its 15 minutes is up.