Facebook has been complaining about how their latest racks of server from AMD and Intel have been unable to provide them the performance improvement which both the companies have been claiming. Facebook Vice President Jonathan Heiliger said that the engineers at Facebook have hardly seen any performance improvement and energy saving  from the new processors from Intel and AMD which both the companies tout. Jonathan Heiliger said, “The biggest thing that surprised us … is the less-than-anticipated performance gains from new micro architectures. The performance gains they are touting in the press, we are not seeing in our applications.”

AMD responded to Jonathan Heiliger’s comment and said that there server class processors are the highest performing and the most energy efficient CPU in the market. AMD also said that there can be a performance difference because of the difference between the Synthetic Benchmarks and Real World Applications. Nigel Dessau from AMD also said that its possible that Facebook is not able to see the desired performance improvement because its application uses more of Java and PHP instead of C++.

Personally speaking, Facebook first needs to optimize their code for better scaling. The current Facebook API says enough about their codes’ scaling efficiency. Newer processors does not always tend to increase the performance if the code/software itself is not able to scale properly.