SPEC, Google pressure component makers on power

By Jon Stokes | Published: December 20, 2007 - 06:44AM CT
ArsTechnica

 In May of last year, SPEC began soliciting feedback from the industry on a forthcoming slate of power efficiency benchmarks. The first of those benchmarks, SPECpower_ssj2008, is now out, but a recent report from Google indicates that the big villains in datacenter power consumption are now memory and networking components that don't provide much in the way of power optimization. In other words, not matter how power efficient an Intel or an IBM makes its chips, the likes of Seagate and Western Digital will now dominate the results of SPEC's new benchmark.

In this short analysis piece, I'll take a look at both the SPEC announcement and the Google report, and at what the two of them say about the future of the datacenter.... Much More  Comment in the Forums