Facebook sides with Tilera in the server architecture debate

Facebook engineers have tested a 64-core specialty chip from Tilera and found it more efficient for grabbing data quickly from key value stores. This test and others performed across the industry on alternatives to x86 chips may galvanize the creation of new benchmarks for the server industry as the debate of which architecture works best for webscale and cloud computing rages.

The paper, issued Monday, and written by three Facebook engineers and one Tilera engineer, is called “Many-Core Key Value Store.” The goal was to test Facebook’s memcached structure using Intel 4-core Xeon and AMD 8-core processors — the de facto standard in most data centers today — against Tilera’s lower-performance (in gigahertz) but massively multicore chips. The paper discovered that for large key value stores such as how Facebook stores its user data, Tilera’s many-node chips were more efficient than multiple Intel or AMD boxes, despite the higher costs associated with using non-commodity chips. Those costs include both the silicon and tweaking the software to run on a different instruction sets.

• Follow this posting on GigaOM…
• Find other postings from GigaOM…