HP's Project Moonshot: A Low-Energy B2B Play to Boost IT Innovation

The seven billion screens that make up our lives today — flat-screen TVs, mobile phones, e-readers, and whatever other surfaces your eyes scan in a day — and the massive amounts of data that flow through them constantly are sucking up a whole fleetload of power. So Hewlett-Packard decided to do something about it.

HP's new Project Moonshot aims to find an alternative to the massive computering infrastructure needed to support the Web and billions of mobile devices. As the company just announced, it "plans to develop extremely low-energy servers, partnering with companies such as chip designers ARM Holdings and Advanced Micro Devices Inc in a move that could threaten the dominance of Intel,” as the Chicago Tribune notes.

In seeking to boost IT innovation, Moonshot is dedicated to finding sustainable alternatives that reduce both the power and space needed to store the loads of info that is being created daily.

The new low-energy server technology (also known as HP's ProLiant server line) is “aimed at companies running large-scale remote computing operations such as Twitter and Facebook,” the Trib notes. Pilot versions of the data centers and servers will be available in the first half of 2012, with a subsequent rollout to the larger marketplace.

Intel’s chips, according to the Trib, “are used in 80 percent of the world's personal computers and servers” but use a lot more electricity than the ARM chips that HP (the 10th-ranked Best Global Brand) is using. Intel, of course, is also trying to get its chips to be energy-efficient as well.

Whoever wins that battle won’t have to worry about their electric bill for a long time to come. Find out more about HP's B2B Moonshot project on its press page and microsite, and follow it on Twitter at @HPHyperscale.