Today in Cleantech
Everyone’s talking about Intel and SeaMicro this morning, so I thought I’d jump in with some specific energy efficiency questions. Intel has custom-designed the 64-bit, dual-core ATOM chip that goes into Santa Clara, Calif.-based SeaMicro’s new low-power, high-performance servers. That’s an unusual move for the chip giant, and industry analysts see it as a sign that Intel’s x86 architecture for commodity servers is being challenged, largely on a watts-per-performance basis, by contenders using ARM architecture and others. The march of Moore’s Law has allowed servers to get smaller and less power-hungry while pumping out more work, a trend that may well be responsible for much of the efficiency gains we’ve seen so far in the data center space. Virtualization is also playing a huge role, albeit again for reasons having less to do with energy bill savings and more with other IT related costs. Changing the physical side of the data center equation — upgrading chillers, air handlers, environmental systems and other systems — is a pricier option. But making smaller and less power-hungry servers may simply add up to more servers per square foot — and squeezing more capacity out of existing data centers is driving the early interest in server energy efficiency. Do IT energy efficiency improvements simply cancel themselves out?
