Powering servers

The jury still seems to be out on the importance of power consumption in computing, at least in the market for servers containing chips like Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s Opteron. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Opterons typically consume 95 W or less, while a new Intel Xeon entry, which foregoes the power Core design that Intel introduced this summer for desktop and laptop computers, consumes 150 W.

That power premium may prove to be a significant disadvantages, unless the new Xeon can provide a compensatory improvement in processing power in the real-world applicatons to which it’s applied. As the Journal article notes, “Corporate computer buyers are paying greater attention to energy bills these days.”

An article in Fortune earlier this month (August 7, p. 69) suggests that sufficient power might not be available even to companies that wouldn’t blink at higher energy bills. The company cites the difficulties of an executive looking to cite a server farm, quoting her as saying, “You go to a local utility and tell them that you want 30 megawatts of power, and they are just catatonic.”