AMD Defends CPU Performance Against Facebook Complaints

[Final8y]

Facebook says that performance of Intel and AMD CPUs isn't what they tout in press

There are at times a significant difference between synthetic benchmarks that are run on CPUs and other hardware and the real world performance that parts are capable of delivering. The problem is that the software and environments that servers and processors run on in the real world are often vastly different that the industry standard server benchmarks.

An example is criticism from Facebook Vice President Jonathan Heiliger who claims that the new servers the social networking site uses are not showing the performance gains that Intel and AMD touted in the press.

According to Heiliger, engineers at the company are not seeing the performance gains expected. AMD has responded to the criticism from Facebook and eWeek reports AMD said that its CPUs are among the highest performing and most efficient available. AMD agrees with the issues on benchmark discrepancies with real world performance and says that what is needed most are benchmarks that reflect real world usage more accurately.

Heiliger said at the Structure conference on June 25, "The biggest thing that surprised us … is the less-than-anticipated performance gains from new microarchitectures. The performance gains they are touting in the press, we are not seeing in our applications."

AMD's Nigel Dessau defended the performance of AMDs Opteron processors saying that the problem for Facebook is that the company runs a highly specialized software stack and performance may be off because its applications run more PHP and Java than C++.

Dessau wrote, "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 [bears] no real resemblance to the real work people do? You get a huge disconnect."

AMD says that its new six-core Opteron parts are striking a balance between performance and energy efficiency. Energy efficiency has become as important to enterprise users as raw performance over the past several months.

dailytech

 

[AMG]

who are they complining about AMD or intel or both o.O and yeah benchies done by ethoir will be *hyped* so you buy them

 

[lsg1r]

It couldn't be down to the facebook coding etc, oh no, blame it on the hardware.
As with all things if the code isn't written very well for the cpu then the performance will suffer, and facebook is just so slow for me I've given up using it!

 

[Final8y]

Both.

It sounds to me like Facebook never designed their software to scale efficiently (understandably so), but instead of overhauling their inadequate code when red flags started appearing (surely 10's of millions of accounts ago) and planning how to properly and efficiently run what would end up being one of the internet's busiest websites, they just kept throwing more hardware at it (not a terrible short-term strategy, but a stop-gap at best). Unfortunately, with their current size, they've probably now reached the tipping point and hardware upgrades alone can't continue to compensate for inefficient programming.

Facebook is probably hoping that, by going on record blaming underperforming hardware, they can have a scapegoat in place to blame for inevitably more frequent gripes about website performance as they continue to grow.

I can't remember ever seeing another major internet company publicly question the performance of the servers that host its website... as far as I know, AMD, Intel, Sun and the other chip and hardware manufacturers catering to the webserver industry have a pretty good performance track record.

http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+Defends+CPU+Performance+Against+Facebook+Complaints/article15713.htm

 

[Big.Wayne]

Pointy fingers time . . .

Facebook blaming AMD for underperforming hardware

AMD blaming Facebook for running underperforming software

I dunno why Facebook don't overclock the chips for some extra speed, failing that why don't they play they RMA card heh!

 

[BIGBC]

Im no software developer but Facebook seems horribly buggy to me, not a site I enjoy using.

 

[Final8y]

Pointy fingers time . . .

Facebook blaming AMD for underperforming hardware

AMD blaming Facebook for running underperforming software

I dunno why Facebook don't overclock the chips for some extra speed, failing that why don't they play they RMA card heh!

Facebook is blaming both AMD and Intel.
Its just that only AMD has responded At the moment.

 

[Ch3m1c4L]

facebook coding = the fail. Buggy as hell, randomly gives errors etc. they should gtfo with coding a proper website. Its never been quick, even before eveyone got on it.

 

[Meeeellar]

who are they complining about AMD or intel or both o.O and yeah benchies done by ethoir will be *hyped* so you buy them

facebook complained about the new xeon and opteran servers.. so yea they are complaining about both.

Facebook said that these new servers weren't worth the resources they spend upgrading them from the older gen saying that there wasn't any significant efficency or performance boost.

 

[AMG]

more likey they should spend more resorces on software develment....rather than blame AMD/intel as its just noobish. consdering that bebo, google and the rest don't have any problems with ethoir

 

[gillywibble]

facebook coding = the fail.

It is poor.

 

[The_Abyss]

AMD and Intel should be congratulated for contributing to make Facebook unusable.

 

[Final8y]

AMD and Intel should be congratulated for contributing to make Facebook unusable.

You don't understand the article it seems.

 

[mmj_uk]

So they've upgraded their servers and not seen a very big performance improvement, that sounds about right in the CPU world unless you overclock.

 

[marscay]

AMD and Intel should be congratulated for contributing to make Facebook unusable.

 

[marscay]

double post

 

[Final8y]

So they've upgraded their servers and not seen a very big performance improvement, that sounds about right in the CPU world unless you overclock.

Overclocking wont help when the bottleneck is elsewhere.