Facebook Loves Intel's New Chip, But Won't Use It


Bangalore: Intel has released its first low power chip for datacenters which use the same technology of Smartphone chips, winning a nod from Facebook. However, according to a Facebook executive who was present at the unveiling, the social network is not planning to use it in its datacenters, atleast for now.

Intel’s step into this yet unaccounted microserver market is targeting internet giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook who are experimenting ways to make their data centers more efficient, mainly by using low power chips. However most of these chips lack the power of original processors for traditional servers. But yet, a datacenter that combine many low power chips instead of big processors will provide more computing power for less electricity.

According to Frank Frankovsky, Facebook infrastructure executive present at the event, "We do face unprecedented scale at Facebook, and that's one of the reasons we're so highly motivated to figure out the most efficient way to scale infrastructure efficiently and support all the people using Facebook,"

Facebook is currently eyeing Avoton, the next generation of low power atom chips that Intel announced earlier. According to Michael Kirckland, who spoke to Gigaom, the current chips dubbed Atom S1200 “doesn’t meet the needs of the social networking giant’s workloads at the moment, but perhaps later generation chips will.”

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