Last month Facebook's vice president of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger blasted Intel and AMD, saying their latest generation of Opteron and Xeon server parts was pants, and that it wasn't worth the trouble. He said the chips were simply not delivering significant performance increases, and were about as economical and power efficient as 19th century steam boats.

AMD didn't take kindly to Heilieger's rant about AMD, Intel and the OEMs behind the server market, and it has responded to the allegations. In a blog post, AMD CMO Nigel Dessau said that the companies latest quad-core and six-core Opterons are some of the most power efficient server CPUs on the market, and he is rigth. Some of them even fit the 40W TDP envelope, which is almost notebook TDP turf.

As for Facebook's complaints about lackluster performance, Dessau pointed out that Facebook elies heavilyon PHP and Java instead of C++, and that synthetic benchmarks simply can't cover every usage scenario and eventuality.

"Let’s face it: synthetic benchmarks are essentially a useful evil," said Dessau. "Everyone wants to know how a certain technology performs against a standardized test, but what happens when that test bares no real resemblance to the real work people do?  You get a huge disconnect." 

You can find the blog entry here.