Facebook VP Slams Intel's, AMD's Chip Performance Claims

narramissic writes "In an interview on stage at GigaOm's Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of technical operations, told Om Malik that the latest generations of server processors from Intel and AMD don't deliver the performance gains that 'they're touting in the press.' 'And we're, literally in real time right now, trying to figure out why that is,' Heiliger said. He also had some harsh words for server makers: 'You guys don't get it,' Heiliger said. '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.' Heiliger added that Google has done a great job designing and building its own servers for this kind of use."

Comments

And yet...

[Junta]

Every major server vendor has jumped on the bandwagon of 'look how efficient we are, and 'cheap'. Three years ago, by and large the tier ones wouldn't bother designing systems without forcing even the cheap design to have parts included to facilitate purchase of redundant add-ons (i.e. power distribution cards designed for dual power supplies regardless of one being bought or not). They would always put a high end storage controller on the planar. They would always make their 'entry' platform be burdened with expensive components to make it easier to option it up.

Now, we have tons of 'internet scale', or 'cloud', or whatever buzzword you feel like. They tend to stress energy efficiency, low cost components, with sales and management strategies targeted at thousands of servers (i.e. IBM iDataplex, HP SL6000). Basically, precisely what he prescribes, though probably not as 'cheap' as he wants. The incentive he gives is that the vendors should have zero margin, which is not particularly compelling for companies to work toward. Google's situation works because they brought it in-house and thus have fewer middle-men. Honestly, from all the rumours I hear, it's the logical thing to do when your server consumption is larger than some respectable computer companies' entire production. If he thinks the volume of servers is high enough to pull a google, by all means do it. Otherwise, be prepared for people not jump at the chance to give their designs to him at zero margin.

Of course, if he is calling them out on performance per-watt by avoiding non-x86 solutions, including ARM, that might be a fair criticism. However, I think company forays into 'exotic' architectures have not panned out in the market recently. Sun's niagra, despite all the worthy praise, couldn't attract a mass-market required to subsidize it for those who benefited most from it. Last year, IBM seemed to be saying Cell architecture would light the world on fire, but have been a lot quieter about it now. The message their buisness leaders have probably taken in is that while these things have their target market, that market isn't worth the expense of developing products that are refused by the larger market and focus instead on leveraging commonly accepted building blocks to do as best they can for that niche, even if it means skipping the 'perfect' solution. Sure, IBM still sells plenty of POWER, but I haven't heard that be *particularly* praised on the performance/watt category like I hear a lot for Niagra, Cell, and ARM. And if not for POWER's legacy, it probably would be still born in the market today. The PA-RISC->Itanium decision for HP probably sank their HP-UX product line faster than banking on legacy of PA-RISC installs, and it seems IBM won't make that mistake, but at the same time I don't hear much about *new* POWER customers.