Intel and Advanced Micro Devices' latest server processors have come in for criticism from Facebook, the social networking company, for failing to deliver on promised performance.

According to Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, the latest generations of server processors from companies like Intel and AMD have failed to deliver anticipated performance gains. "The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications," he said at the GigaOm's Structure conference in San Francisco recently.

A massive consumer of servers, Facebook is constantly looking to upgrade its infrastructure as well as minimize power consumption to cut costs.

The hardware industry, too, has failed to deliver servers that are highly power-efficient for companies such as Facebook and Amazon, Heiliger said. "To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient."

According to Heilinger, Google, which has designed and built its own servers, has done a good job.

In order to meet the needs of companies deploying large computing clusters, Heiliger said they should come together to develop common standards that vendors can design for.