Jonathan Heiliger, vp of technical operations at Facebook, came down heavily on chip manufacturers Intel, AMD for making tall claims about server chips that eventually don’t live up to the hype. He was speaking at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco.
"The performance gains they are touting in the press, we are not seeing in our applications. We are literally in real-time trying to figure out why that is and if there are optimizations that we can do. Otherwise, we are kind of left with current-generation technology and current-generation scale," he said during a Q&A session involving GigaOM’s founder Om Malik.
He said companies like Facebook and Amazon require their servers to be both power-efficient and affordable. Heiliger also commended Google for its server-designing prowess.
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Intel appears to have hit a groove with its 32nm Clarkdale processors. Earlier this month, motherboard makers with the inside scoop reported that Intel had decided to axe its 45nm Havendale chips in favor of pushing 32nm Clarkdale chips in the first quarter of 2010. Those same sources are now saying Intel will begin mass-producing its 32nm chips in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Getting off to a big start, the company’s 32nm Clarkdale processors are expected to account for 10 percent of Intel’s total OEM desktop CPU shipments in Q4. By 2010, Intel expects that number to double to 20 percent.
Meanwhile, AMD is still looking to ramp up production in the middle of 2010 with mass production not expected until Q4 of next year, potentially putting Intel a year ahead of the No.2 chip maker.
Image Credit: Intel
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Development for 32nm is going well for Intel, so well that the chip maker has decided to axe its 45nm Havendale chips before they reached volume production and will make the move to the 32nm Clarkdale instead, according to DigiTimes. Havendale was originally scheduled to launch by the end of the year, but Intel will instead go forward with 32nm Clarkdale in the first quarter of 2010.
Citing sources at motherboard makers, DigiTimes says Intel also plans to mark several processors as EOL (end of life) in the second half of 2009 and through the first quarter of 2010. Among them will be the Core 2 Extreme QX9775, Core i7 940, and a bunch of Core 2 Quad, Pentium, and Celeron CPUs. The chip maker will also begin discontinuing both the Atom 330 and Atom 220 in April 2010.
Meanwhile, the sources say Intel plans to launch the Core 2 Quad Q9505S, a quad-core CPU designed specifically for all-in-on PCs.
Image Credit: Intel
