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Santa Clara, CA - Intel announced yesterday a new processor, code named Black Butte Ranch, that will be optimized for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The processors will be quad-core processors that dedicate at least one core to all social media interactions. "Most people don't think of Facebook or Twitter when they think of processor intense applications, but those people just don't know anything," said Carlos Zemanaya of Intel. "The biggest reason Twitter goes down is that people's CPUs aren't processing tweets fast enough. The Black Butte Ranch processor will eliminate downtime for Twitter."
Zemanaya said that Intel has worked closely with many social media sites to help them write code optimized for the instruction set. "With the insertion of a few custom tags the HTML code gets processed over four times faster by the 'Black Butte Ranch' core."
Productivity increases due to faster rendering times could help pull the economy out of the doldrums. In lab tests Facebook page rendering times went from 1.45 seconds to 1.42 seconds. "That may not seem like much," said Zemanaya, "but when you consider Americans spent over 36 billion hours on Facebook you're looking at a lot less time on Facebook and more time working in the aggregate."
Zemanaya said that the rendering time of the Facebook "like thumbs up" was "mind blowing."
The improvements aren't just limited to Facebook and Twitter. Intel has partnered with hundreds of social media and networking sites on speed improvements. Flickr, Google Buzz, Digg, Reddit, Fark, Orkut and Ning are just some of the other partners. For a full list of partners check the Intel web site.
This isn't the first time that Intel has announced a processor optimized for a specific task. Back in 1990, the company released the 486-DX-WC, which was optimized for the Microsoft Windows 3.0 calculator.
The processor should be available in the fourth quarter of 2010. Stock in AMD was up on the news
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