GigaOm has an interview with Facebook VP Jonathan Heileger.

Heiliger had strong words for OEMs and system builders during his chat with Om. To compete with sites like Facebook and Google, Heiliger said, OEMs and system builders need to be more power- and cost-efficient. “You guys just don’t get it,” he said, adding that Facebook has reaped success from investing heavily in its infrastructure.

InternetNews focused on the Intel and AMD dig.

Intel, AMD Get Thumbs Down from Facebook

Head of the social network's technical operations say the latest and greatest from Intel and AMD don't make the grade.

June 25, 2009
By Andy Patrizio: More stories by this author:

SAN FRANCISCO – Intel and AMD just got a nasty smackdown from the person who run's Facebook's datacenters, saying the chips don't deliver on their promises.

Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations for Facebook, was being interview by GigaOm Network founder Om Malik here at the GigaOm Structure 09 conference. Malik asked him about unexpected problems in managing the fast-growing company's datacenters.

Reps from Intel (NASDQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD), both running panels and present at the show, must have clenched their teeth when they heard this:

"The biggest thing … was 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," Heiliger told the audience.

He didn't let the tier one server vendors off any easier. "I'm not sure if I'm embarrassed or pleased for OEM vendors in the audience, but you guys don't get it. To build servers for a company like Facebook and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, they have to be cheap and super power efficient," said Heiliger.

He added he's not sure why hardware vendors fail at the job, but thinks customers need to step up and apply pressure. ""Perhaps in the coming months we'll see more collaboration with people running small clusters and large clusters," he said.