Intel makes major play in server efficiency

It has been four years since Uptime Intelligence first reported the conundrum of server power efficiency. Although the potential gains had resumed in line with the long-term historical trend, extracting these gains was becoming increasingly difficult with new server generations (see Five data center predictions for 2022). Not only is the carefree ride on the back of server technology evolution over, in the worst-case scenario newer servers can (in practice) be less efficient than older models without proper configuration or high enough utilization.

The fundamental reason for this is that the bulk of server power efficiency gains since the start of this decade has been linked to increasing the numbers of processor cores per CPU. In a few years, a single mainstream server will have more than 500 cores, packing as much performance as a couple of IT racks did merely 10 years earlier.