The Bandwidth Crunch Begins Friday, June 26 2009
A Facebook VP laments that new AMD and Intel processors aren't performing in reality the way marketing would have you believe. I personally believe that this makes total sense. Most of the work that Facebook does is limited by memory bandwidth when serving up data to users, or disk bandwidth when doing analytics for internal use. While the Core i7 does address the memory bandwidth issue to some degree, the fact is that RAM -- relative to processors -- is only getting slower. So while there might be some gains for a few of the things that Intel and AMD tune their microarchitecture for (namely SPEC) nobody has put together a benchmark for commodity compute clusters and as a result none of the vendors can tune for the use case. Our aim here is to slot right into the niche that companies like Facebook, Amazon and Yahoo have need of and to satisfy the demand. New Chips Don't Deliver
