As reported in the March 26th issue of GreenerComputing News (you do subscribe, right?), the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) is in the process of formulating a power-consumption benchmark for workstations. SPEC is a vendor-neutral, non-profit organization that designs benchmarks for the computer industry. It also hosts a website, www.spec.org, that presents benchmark results for various platforms. Those results are provided by vendors of hardware and software systems who certify that they ran the benchmarks in accordance with SPEC guidelines. While SPEC cannot and does not vouch for those results, the industry puts real effort into maintaining the integrity of posted results. And because those results often figure

In this column, I have previously examined energy-saving options on processors and hard disks. This time around, I'd like to examine one of the other principal energy sinks on the standard PC: graphics cards. Graphics cards are a confusing area of technology because almost all the attention and press the cards receive is dedicated to the high-end, super-expensive cards favored by gamers and hardware aficionados. Those users live and die by the next release of whiz-bang features and the number of anti-aliased triangles that can be displayed. But if you're choosing graphics capabilities for a business system, the likelihood that anti-aliased triangles are important to your choice is close to nil. And that means that you'll be able to save energy, because generally, the more powerful the

Early this month, I attended the Technical Forum of the Green Grid vendor consortium. The Green Grid is a recently formed group that brings together major businesses to establish useful tools and policies for eco-responsibility in IT shops. Its activities include defining metrics for the IT industry, establishing best practices, and encouraging adoption of both. The two-day forum was narrowly focused on the quest for useful, usable metrics that measure energy efficiency in data centers. While many members of the technical committee have been working on this problem long before Green Grid existed, I was surprised by how little consensus there was on how to measure energy efficiency and how crude the proposed measures currently are. This observation does not in any way denigrate the