Facebook VP Says Intel, AMD Don't Deliver Promised Performance Increase

Jonathan Heiliger, vp of technical operations at Facebook, came down heavily on chip manufacturers Intel, AMD for making tall claims about server chips that eventually don’t live up to the hype. He was speaking at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco.

"The performance gains they are touting in the press, we are not seeing in our applications. We are literally in real-time trying to figure out why that is and if there are optimizations that we can do. Otherwise, we are kind of left with current-generation technology and current-generation scale," he said during a Q&A session involving GigaOM’s founder Om Malik.

He said companies like Facebook and Amazon require their servers to be both power-efficient and affordable. Heiliger also commended Google for its server-designing prowess.

 Image Credit: Darren Mckeeman (Flickr)