Silvio Weeren, who chairs the Association’s Technical Committee 38, which deals with power issues, said the idea is to provide metrics for application performance per Watt, the power issue being singularly absent from older benchmarks such as TPC from the Transaction Processing Performance Council, or floating-point operations per second.
Weeren acknowledged that a benchmark for PCs and laptops will address only part of the issue because much of the concern voiced over the last year or two has been about data center power and cooling, particularly as blade architectures become more prevalent. We intend to do something for servers too, but there are other organizations such as Spec.org and the Green Grid that are also working on that, he said.