Facebook vice president of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger says he's disappointed by performance gains offered by the latest Intel and AMD server CPUs.

Facebook has a massive user base, and it's still growing rapidly, and thus constantly upgrading and expanding its infrastructure to keep up with growth. However, the latest server parts simply don't seem to deliver advertised performance gains.

"The biggest thing that surprised us is ... 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," said Heiliger. "And we're, literally in real time right now, trying to figure out why that is."

Heiliger thinks chipmakers and OEMs are missing the point when it comes to power efficiency and server functionality needed for homogenous applications.

"You guys don't get it," Heiliger said. "To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient."

In spite of working with server makers on improving their products, Facebook claims they still continue to fail.

More here.