Wimpy cores are coming to Facebook. But which cores?
Facebook has made waves by detailing its plans to use what an executive calls “cell-phone chips” — or “wimpy cores” — in its future data centers. Frank Frankovsky, the VP of infrastructure at Facebook told me that the social network plans to test such chips now and throughout next year, with plans to have them in production in 2014. “We’re testing and generally bullish on the category, and based on some of the early testing our useful work per watt per dollar will improve, although that varies by workload,” said Frankovsky. “Although our Hip Hop [loads are] the most CPU intensive and that hasn’t been ruled out.” HipHop is the open source code Facebook uses to speed up the PHP code underlying the entire site.
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