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Interesting that they worked directly with Intel on this. I wonder if the cost savings from a power perspective were worth all this engineering effort? It's imp
by iamleppert 11y ago
Interesting that they worked directly with Intel on this. I wonder if the cost savings from a power perspective were worth all this engineering effort? It's impressive in its own right to go to the lengths of customizing the hardware in such a way, but I'm not sold on the business case.
It seems like you'd get a lot more for your money just by finding cheaper sources of energy (or building your data centers near a cheap, renewable source) and using commodity low power chips that have already been proven to work well for server work loads.
- wmf 11y agoFacebook is already using the cheapest energy they can find. If Facebook is buying, say, $20M worth of Intel processors per year then you can imagine how it's possible to get ROI on a few million worth of engineering effort.
- Bluestrike2 11y agoThey're probably taking a pretty long view on the cost savings and considering future expansion. Based on the article, I'm thinking Intel ate up some of the costs with this to recoup them with other sales.
- detaro 11y agoTheir hardware before has been custom as well, and I'd guess the CPU work was mostly Intel getting input from Facebook to help figure out what's best to counter eventual server ARM chips. It's not like Xeon-D are a limited design custom made for Facebook, they are going to be an important part of Intels lineup. And even if your electricity is cheap, you still have to get the energy out of the data center again.