Hewlett Packard Co. has announced its plans on development of extremely low-energy servers in partnership with companies such as chip designers ARM Holdings Plc and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Photo: Paul Santeler, HP vice president and general manager, displays a server
from the Project Moonshot prototype server, by REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Technology companies are now looking for sustainable ways of making servers more efficient and decreasing the electricity usage. The No.2 Newsweek Greenest Company 2011 is intended to make real changes in this sphere. The tech giant has teamed up with Austin-based start-up chipmaker Calxeda, which uses the ARM technology in its microprocessors to create servers that will significantly reduce both power and space requirements. These new servers are aimed at companies running large-scale remote computing operations such as Twitter and Facebook. The pilot servers will be available in the first half of next year, though it’s not known yet when HP starts selling the product.

According to Reuters, at an event at its research center in Palo Alto, HP said the effort, dubbed ‘Project Moonshot,’ aimed to find an alternative to the massive computing infrastructure needed to support the Web and billions of mobile devices.

Energy-efficient chips made using ARM technology are widely used in tablets and smartphones and ARM executives declared they want to make them popular for personal computers and corporate servers too. British chip designer ARM last week unveiled its first 64-bit architecture, which challenges the servers market currently dominated by Intel.

Storage, networking and software companies are also included into HP’s program. The company is also developing other servers using Intel’s Atom processor that are. In comparison to ARM-based chips more powerful but utilize much more electricity. Intel is working on making its processors more energy efficient.