HP Will Use Intel’s Atom Chips In Low-Energy Servers

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), the world’s largest personal-computer maker, will use Intel Corp. (INTC)’s Atom processors to make low-energy servers as part of an effort to reduce power consumption in its products.

Bloomberg added that the machines, part of a program dubbed Project Moonshot, are designed to help customers reduce server complexity, energy use and costs, Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard said today in a statement.

Hewlett-Packard is competing for corporate data-center budgets with Dell Inc. (DELL), International Business Machines Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., as well as with servers that customers assemble themselves. The Moonshot servers use derivatives of chips designed for devices like mobile phones and laptops to perform computing tasks while drawing less power.

New Atom-based systems called Gemini will debut later this year and target computing jobs such as Internet hosting, Web content delivery and processing data stored in the open-source Hadoop file system, said Paul Santeler, a vice president and general manager at Hewlett-Packard, at an event in San Francisco. The servers are housed in small cartridges and thousands of them can fit in a single rack to load computing power in a small space, he said in an interview.

In November, Hewlett-Packard demonstrated server cartridges in the Moonshot program using ARM Holdings Plc (ARM) technology, originally designed for mobile devices that use energy more efficiently than larger computers. Dell on May 29 announced it had begun delivering ARM-based servers to customers including the Texas Advanced Computing Center.