THE energy efficiency battle between Linux and Windows is intensifying, with each claiming to be better at cutting power consumption and avoiding environmental damage.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. has touted its "green computing" image following a recent independent test that ranked Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5's power efficiency over Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 on three different hardware platforms.

Woo hoo! We got our hands on the first 8-socket Opteron server on the market — the Sun Fire X4600 from Sun Microsystems. This well-designed 4U system packs more power than we knew what to do with (really). That's 16 processor cores, courtesy of the Opteron 8000 series chip. Other important features include

This three-part series is your starting point for tuning your system for power efficiency. In Part 3, the author compares the performance of the five in-kernel governors in both tuned and untuned states to show you how to optimize a Linux-based System x server.

In the interests of efficiency I eventually settled on XFCE as my desktop environment to give me a balance of eye candy and resource efficiency. It did everything quite well and I had no trouble watching videos. Until...

This three-part series is your starting point for tuning your system for power efficiency. In Part 1, get up to speed on the components and concepts you need to fine-tune a Linux-based System x server for power efficiency.

The combination of free software from the likes of Linux and GNU with virtualisation - which maximises computing efficiency - is a compelling proposition. It offers lower costs, flexibility and greater efficiency, plus environmental benefits

NCR announced two compact POS (point of sale) devices that run SUSE Linux for Point of Service, as well as a number of Windows operating systems. The RealPOS 40 and RealPOS 60 use Intel Atom and Celeron processors, respectively, offer enhanced energy efficiency, and provide both four powered serial ports and up to eight powered USB ports, the company says.

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) today announced its newest specification, TPC-Energy, which measures the energy usage of a server to gauge not only transactions per second but transactions per watt as well.