Following the release of the Xeon 5300 this month, another low-power quad core processor will appear in early 2007 which Hannath said will reduce power consumption by 40 percent to around 50W.

The Clovertown Xeons will have uniprocessor (UP) and multiprocessor (MP) 7000 series which will scale up to 32-way systems.

Hannath said the rise of the "consumer datacenter" resulting from Web 2.0 applications like YouTube is putting pressure on capacity meaning there will be a lot more servers installed to support users.

"This is a concern to IT managers, CIOs and power companies," he said. "If we're going to have eight times as many servers in the datacenter there is one thing that's important - the amount of electricity things these use."

Hannath said as much as 25 percent of enterprise IT costs will be spent on power and Intel will focus on "keeping performance beyond user expectations and keeping power demands down".