Meta's Heterogeneous Fleet

Last month, I mentioned the following on Meta’s Chip Resilience:

“…in an earlier blog post last year, Meta’s own engineers mentioned dealing with 5–6 hardware SKUs a year makes it harder to move workloads around and can create underutilization and software friction. From Meta’s own blog post last year (emphasis mine):

“From an operator point of view, it is difficult for Meta to deal with 5-6 different SKUs of hardware deployed every year. Heterogeneity of the fleet makes it difficult to move workloads around, leading to underutilized hardware. It is difficult for software engineers to think about building and optimizing workloads for different types of hardware. If new hardware necessitates the rewriting of libraries, kernels, and applications, then there will be strong resistance to adoption of new hardware. In fact, the current state of affairs is making it hard for hardware companies to design products because it is difficult to know what data center, rack, or power specifications to build for.”

Given this context, while I was encouraged to see Meta’s diversified chip strategy, I was also a tad bit concerned whether the trade-off has too high a cost. However, I have now updated my opinion that Meta is increasingly quite enviably positioned due to their heterogenous hardware fleet which I will elaborate further behind the paywall.

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