Green IT Toolkit

Intel left out of environmental IT effort

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 20 Apr 2006 10:00 BST

AMD, HP, Sun and IBM announced the Green Grid project on Wednesday to help computing customers reduce energy consumption — and to gain a competitive advantage by letting customers know which companies can assist.

The Green Grid project is trying to reduce power consumption in computing data centres by sharing proven ideas and establishing methods to measure problems and progress, the companies said Wednesday.

The effort comes as computing customers struggle with burgeoning electricity consumption and attendant heating problems. While computing companies are in part to blame through ever-hotter chips and servers, they're also trying to address the problem and to get an edge over competitors.

One major rivalry is between AMD and Intel. AMD's Opteron mainstream server processors consume 95W, compared to a range of 110-165W for Intel's Xeon. When it comes to servers, Sun has built an ad campaign around the idea of using less energy.

The Green Grid effort is open to computing professionals, hardware and software companies, systems integrators and others, but Intel isn't involved.

"We were not asked to join," spokesman Scott McLaughlin said. "We've been involved in a lot of alliances and have a history of developing industry ecosystems. Regardless of who's organising it, we're always ready to participate as long as it's focused on the customer not just issuing press releases."