I think we read different articles. He's not saying he didn't plan well enough, he's saying that Intel and AMD promise that Gen Y processor is 35% faster than Gen X processor, and he's not seeing anywhere near 35% in real world performance. The 35% is a made up number but it doesn't matter what the number is that they claim. He's probably correct. Manufacturers pull this stuff all the time. Look at the recent articles on battery life claims on notebook's. AMD came out and called BS on the whole thing and basically said if you guys don't stop lying through your teeth, the FTC is going to regulate us. From the perspective you are taking, that would mean we have to call AMD incompetent for not understanding how batteries work and not properly selecting them.
Manufacturers ALWAYS overstate claims in computer related products. CRT actual inches vs viewable inches (thank you lcd's for finally being honest... about inches anyway.. brightness and contrast however....) Computer speaker wattage being 1/2 or 1/4 of what's claimed. Power supply efficiency or wattage not measuring up to claims... you name it. He's calling out what he see's to be bogus claims based on a real world experiences in a demanding environment, the type of environment where one is always looking for better performance. I think we should get some more information before declaring him to be the problem as I'm sure he has a whole team of people that are working on this issue.
What I'd like to see from him is some numbers. On this Intel (or AMD) rig, we get so many operations per hour/minute/whatever. On this new Intel (or AMD) rig which they claim is 20% faster than the previous rig, we're only seeing this number of operations per hour which amounts to only a 7% gain, thus we're seeing 13% less than they are claiming. Again, numbers made up for examples sake. I'd also be very interested in what a typical rig of theirs looks like... X Processor, Y Ram, what type of storage system is it connected to, etc. I think such numbers are vital to understanding the issues at hand. We all know that vendors will run the benchmarks that makes their stuff look the best, and that is often not reflective of real world performance. If I was Intel/AMD I'd be chiming in right about now and opening a dialog with Facebook and looking to see what the issues are. Facebook is a big customer with huge name recognition and you want to be able to use them as an example of your solution delivering the promised performance for your marketing. I'm going to assume (I know I know) that they are already working with the server vendor to try and see what's going on here.
The major difference between bonds and bond traders is that the bonds will eventually mature.