Atom is the name of a series of processors from Intel, designed both for a 45 nm CMOS process and low power applications. Lately, thanks their low power consumption, they are used especially for netbooks. Saving energy is a must everywhere and Microsoft's researchers must follow this trend also. For this reason they are testing the Atom processors on their low powered servers.

The Atom processors consume about one-twentieth of the energy required by conventional server processors and, due to they are not powerful, it could be necessary to use many of them in a data center. Since each one of them wastes less energy, by using the same amount of energy the data center as a whole can be more efficient and get more work done. Nowadays the server hardware cost is much lower than the energy cost to power a data center over time!

The Atom processors have another peculiarity: due to they were designed for netbooks, they can be quickly put into sleep states and then quickly woken up. It has been estimated that servers stay in idle state about 75% of the time, so, putting idle Atom servers to sleep, the energy consumption could be cut by another 90%. Atom processor and energy saving could become an inseparable couple next years.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&...