Yesterday Facebook and Intel announced a partnership to provide all of Facebook’s servers as they expand. The result is that thousands of servers will have “Intel Inside”. I’m not sure that this is really a substantial announcement considering a large portion of servers on the web are powered by Intel. These will be Intel Xeon servers are the top-tier Intel server processors. What does that mean for the Facebook website?

Not much aside from there being a good chance of the site improving its’ speed and hopefully increasing its uptime. The press statement predicts a better world as a result of this partnership:

Both companies envision that the collaboration may benefit not only Facebook, but ideally the Web 2.0 industry at-large. Intel plans to work with Facebook to evaluate ways to improve its software performance on Intel-based servers. Intel has a wealth of software engineering expertise as well as such tools as Intel VTune™ and Intel Thread Checker to help companies improve application performance on multi-core Intel processors. Since Facebook’s applications are mostly built on open source technologies, the companies believe that some of the insights from this collaboration may be contributed back to the open source community, benefiting other companies that use similar underlying technologies.

I’m not sure that it’s as big of a deal as Intel has hyped it up to be but it is definitely good news for both companies. Hopefully we will continued reliability in the increasingly popular social platform.