Alas, this has led to bloated servers chewing through energy and also requiring masses of air conditioning wherever they're housed. As such, server hardware is starting to look anachronistic as the western world transitions to using less energy.

The question of how to use less power in the data center has been occupying a lot of clever minds recently, and the smell of revolution is in the air. More accurately, and to , we're not yet seeing the end of high-energy server computing. But we're perhaps at the beginning of the end.

It's not innovation in server CPU technology that's bringing about change. Instead, it's all about appropriating technology at the other end of the computing spectrum: .

These chips typically consume just a handful of watts of power--a fraction of their desktop and server counterparts. They might not be anywhere near as powerful in computing terms, but they come out far better if performance is measured against every watt of energy spent.

Marvell technology normally found in mobile phones and tablets to create a server chip. This in turn was made possible because of new 64-bit designs from ARM, a company that makes no hardware itself but merely licenses its designs to numerous third-party manufacturers.