Energy-efficient milestone

Intel Corporation has announced two energy-efficient 50 W server processors that represent a 35 to nearly 60% decrease in power from Intel's existing 80 and 120 W quad-core server products.

As companies increasingly focus on reducing electricity bills and cooling costs associated with their computing needs, these new processors, requiring 12.5 W of power for each of the four cores or processing engines, deliver similar performance yet set a new standard in energy efficiency.

Servers based on the new low-power, quad-core processors are designed for dense Internet datacentres, blade servers and industries such as financial services where the scale and density of servers are highly sensitive to power, real estate and cooling costs.

The potential for cost savings by replacing ageing infrastructure with Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and deploying virtualisation technology can be as much as $6000 per year over the lifetime of each server based on Intel's own evaluations.

In addition, the company claims that these new processors represent a nearly tenfold improvement in power consumption per core in just 1½ years.