The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) has performed a study comparing the power consumption of a server using Intel® Xeon® 5400 “Harpertown” processors to the same server using previous generation “Clovertown” processors, running a market data load of two million updates per second across a stacked Reuters RMDS configuration that utilized as many of the eight cores in this system as possible.
The Harpertown processor decreased the server’s overall power consumption by 16 per cent (333 watts versus 395 watts) and increased the server’s market data efficiency (updates per second per watt) by 19 per cent (6010 ups/W versus 5060 ups/W).