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Data Center Efficiency

Data center efficiency

Data center efficiency is critical to business needs as computer requirements grow, density increases, and power and cooling demands climb. Intel is helping the industry address areas where data centers consume power including power conversion and distribution, cooling, and even lighting.

To do this, Intel is focusing on data center performance metrics and improving energy efficiency at the processor, platform, and data center levels.

Developing better performance metrics

In collaboration with industry standards organizations such as the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) and The Green Grid, Intel is helping to develop a more reliable metric that measures energy consumption and performance for all levels of utilization-idle to peak-that a server would experience in a typical day, week or month. Developing more reliable industry-accepted metrics will give server manufacturers:

  • Better guidelines for designing energy efficient servers
  • Better ways to demonstrate energy efficiency to customers
  • Fairer product comparisons for competition on the basis of energy efficiency
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Driving efficiency at the processor level

Intel has been delivering greater performance in the same power envelope year after year. With the transistor breakthrough of hafnium-based Intel® 45nm high-k metal gate technology, Intel continues to deliver revolutionary server processor speeds while reducing the amount of electrical leakage from transistors that can hamper chip and server design, size, power consumption, noise, and costs.

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Through silicon process, microarchitecture improvements, and the use of new materials, we're delivering energy-efficient server technology without compromise to performance:

  • Up to 2x greater scalable performance¹ and 3x the performance per watt² with Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 series, compared to previous generation Intel Xeon processors
  • Up to 20 percent better performance and up to 38 percent better performance per watt with Intel Xeon processor 5400 series compared to previous generation Intel Xeon processors³

Improving energy efficiency at the platform level

Intel continues to make strides in energy efficiency at the platform level with improved server utilization, energy efficient platform components, and efforts throughout the server ecosystem. At the platform level, hardware-assisted Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT)§ helps to provide maximum system utilization by consolidating multiple environments into a single server, workstation, or PC. With Intel Dynamic Power Node Manager Technology and Demand-Based Switching, server performance and power consumption are dynamically optimized to maximize server rack density.

Some additional efforts include:

  • Work with industry and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine the best performance for servers, including potential cost savings from the use of energy efficient products
  • Work with the Climate Savers Computing Initiative to deliver significantly increased PC and server energy-efficiency by uniting industry, consumers, government, and conservation organizations
  • Work with the PMBus organization on an open-standard digital power management protocol to facilitate communication with a power converter or other device to enable programming, control and real-time monitoring of power conversion devices
  • Increase performance density, lower total cost of operation, and improve availability with the Intel Dynamic Power Node Manager, available on Intel Next Generation Server Platforms (Nehalem-EP), that delivers power reporting and capping capabilities
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Promoting data center efficiency

Lowering overall power consumption

Intel is a board member of the Green Grid, a nonprofit consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers around the globe.

Improving power efficiency

A recent Data Center Journal’s article discusses Intel’s study that achieved roughly 75 percent efficiency with facility-level 380V DC distribution by using best-in-class components compared to the 50-percent power efficiency of the typical data center.

Data center cooling solutions can now include liquid and air cooling.

Intel achieved breakthrough power and heat densities of 15 kilowatts per cabinet and more than 500 watts per square foot of server room area, at a lower cost than most data center designs.

Collaborating with utility companies

Intel, in collaboration with Northern California Utility Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) helped develop rebates for consolidation-driven data center deployments, becoming a model for other utilities in the US and world.

Enabling simplified management for large data centers

Data Center Management Interface, derived from IPMI 2.0, reduces the cost and complexity of server platform management in high density data centers.

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¹ Performance measured using the SPECint*_rate_base2006 benchmark. Intel internal, early platform measurements (September 2007) comparing system configurations of four Intel® Xeon® processor X7350 series, 2.93GHz, 2x4MB L2 Cache, 1066 MHz system bus, with four Intel® Xeon® processor 7140M, 3.40 GHz with 16M L3 cache.

² Performance measured using the SPECint*_rate_base2006 performance/watt benchmark. Intel internal, early platform measurements (September 2007) comparing system configurations of four Intel® Xeon® processor E7340 series, 2.4GHz, 2x4MB L2 cache, with four Intel® Xeon® processor 7140M, 3.40 GHz with 16M L3 cache, 800 MHz system bus.

³ Intel® Xeon® processor x5460 series delivers up to 20 percent (1.25x) higher performance when compared to Intel® Xeon® processor 5365 series as published/measured using SPECjbb2005* in November 12th, 2007. Intel® Xeon® processor 5450 series delivers up to 38% (1.38x) higher performance per watt when compared to Intel® Xeon® processor E5335 as published/measured using SPECjbb2005* in November 12th, 2007.

§ Intel® Virtualization Technology requires a computer system with an enabled Intel® processor, BIOS, virtual machine monitor (VMM) and, for some uses, certain platform software enabled for it. Functionality, performance or other benefits will vary depending on hardware and software configurations and may require a BIOS update. Software applications may not be compatible with all operating systems. Please check with your application vendor.