Facebook exec blasts chipmakers over sluggish servers

Facebook claims that it is not seeing anticipated performance gains from new chip micro-architectures

One of Facebook's top technical executives is raking chipmakers over the coals for sluggish server performance.

Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's vice president of technical operations, said that CPU vendors such as Intel and AMD were not delivering on the levels of performance promised by their latest chips.

"The biggest thing that surprised us [was] less than anticipated performance gains from new micro-architectures," Heiliger said during an internetview with blogger Om Malik.

"New CPUs from guys like Intel and AMD, the performance gains they're touting in the press, we are not seeing in our applications."

Heiliger said that the disappointing chip performance became most visible in recent weeks when the company began to roll out its new custom profile URL service in which users are allowed to pick their own profile page addresses.

If the company cannot figure out a way to better optimise its software and take further advantage of the new chips, Heiliger expressed concern that Facebook's own development could suffer.

"We are literally in real time trying to figure out why that is, and if there are different optimisations we can do," he said. "Otherwise we're left with current-generation technology and current-generation scale."