AMD to Facebook: It's the Benchmarks

A Facebook exec caused a bit of a stir at last month's GigaOm's Structure 09 conference when he complained that the newest generation of processors from AMD and Intel were not living up to their performance billing. That had to hurt AMD (NYSE: AMD), a major sponsor of the show. Margaret Lewis, a product marketing director at AMD, said in a blog post, "It was hard not to squirm in my seat."

"The biggest thing ... was less-than-anticipated performance gains from new microarchitectures, so new CPUs from guys like Intel and AMD. The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications," Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's vice president of technical operations, said at the time.

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