Representatives of Sun Microsystems and AMD announced that they would promote energy efficiency metric for servers, similar to the miles per gallon metric used in the automotive industry. The companies intend to work together with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Lawrence Berkeley Labs to define a standard that describes the efficiency of a server, but did not provide details what factors - beyond plain power consumption and heat dissipation - would be considered.

Edward Hunter, director for Sun's "Eco Responsibility Initiative," said, "This is the right time for the industry to act on this important issue, and the impact will be felt for years to come. These critical issues of power and cooling in the data center are at the top of the agenda for our customers and other companies spanning multiple industries."

Sun and AMD are planning to release the metric in Summer of this year; the firms claim that once defined, the proposed metric "will enable IT purchasers to conduct side-by-side, industry standard comparisons for energy efficiency in servers, similar to benchmark measurements such as SPEC and TPC widely used today to evaluate system speed and processing power."