An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is looking for senior software development engineer to help with its Bing data centers, potentially running them on ARM hardware, according to this EE Times article. Whoever gets the job "can own the decision on the hardware that we use," the job description said, and added that power management is a key aspect of the job.
And ARM is explicitly mentioned, as are solid-state disk drives as an area of experimentation in the quest to reduce power but Intel does not get a mention.
Microsoft was reportedly experimenting with the Intel Atom microprocessor in February 2009 with a view to creating a green low-power data center. One issue discussed then was the Atom microprocessor lacked performance compared with other Intel processors and that therefore any power saving might be negated by the need for more processors to carry a given computational load.
Looks like Intel may have missed out.