Posts tagged with Facebook

Let me first give a nod to my colleague Margaret Lewis, who blogged about her experience at the GigaOm Structure ’09 event, particularly around hearing comments from Facebook’s Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, first hand. While I was 1,500 miles away in Austin, I think I squirmed in my seat just as much as Margaret when AMD was lumped into the category of vendors that “just don’t get it.”

As an industry, we need to accept that he makes some good points.

While in raw, classic benchmark terms, we continue to deliver great leaps in performance, I suspect the Facebook IT and programming model doesn’t look like “classic benchmarks”.  It’s probably more PHP and Java than C++.

Oh dear, I hear the cry go up, we are about to talk about the problem of benchmarking, and synthetic benchmarks at that.

Let’s face it: synthetic benchmarks are essentially a useful evil. Everyone wants to know how a certain technology performs against a standardized test, but what happens when that test bares no real resemblance to the real work people do?  You get a huge disconnect.  

And this spans everything from notebook battery life to the debate of ACP vs. TDP in servers.

For hyperscale data center customers ― customers who build massive server farms that typically power cloud environments — when a benchmark is a tiny bit off compared to real world implementations, it can get magnified, a lot.  

I propose that what the industry needs is flexibility:  different tests for different kinds of usage models, and this is something we definitely “get” – but maybe have been too slow to deliver on.

 We also need servers that deliver efficient performance, not only raw performance.

This is exactly why we introduced the Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ EE processor – a fully featured processor at 40W ACP.  And, it’s exactly why I’m excited we are introducing the Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processor this week.  For more on that, please read Andy Parma’s blog that looks at the performance advantages of this new processor.

This continues our tradition of bringing highly efficient, power-optimized solutions to market to meet the demands of customers small and large – from small businesses to massive server farms.

In the future we plan to focus much more on smart processors that meet varying needs depending on what applications our customers run. But we can’t do this alone – we need to work with our ecosystem partners, both OEMs and ISVs, to make sure all the necessary parts are working together.

Taking it a step further, we want to build tests that help our customers anticipate the performance and efficiency gains you’ll see from our processors. Real world tests.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.