Several companies are working to create cloud computing volume servers using "wimpy chips". These are low power, low speed chips designed for mobile devices. The idea is that large numbers of these in a server can yield lower energy consumption wall maintaining cost-effective performance.

SeaMicro introduces itself by noting:

Volume servers consume more than 1% of the total electricity used in the United States—More than $3 Billion dollars each year. Over the last six years, the power consumed by volume servers more than doubled. For companies in the data center, power consumption is the largest Operating Expense...often accounting for more than 30% of Op EX.

SeaMicro's response in 2010 was its SM100000 volume server, which the company claims "Uses ¼ the power and takes ¼ the space of today's best in class..." The company says its array of 512 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPUs uses less than 2kW of power. The Intel Atom chip is for e-devices, so it is designed to be very power-efficient, which makes it appealing for this kind of application.

ARM chips are an even more popular e-device engine and are said to account for ~90% of all embedded 32-bit RISC CPUs. SmoothStone is a start-up trying to adopt ARM to volume servers. It received a $48 million equity infusion from a diverse set of investors, including the investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi.

The opposite of "wimpy" is "brawny". SeaMicro announced in January 2012 "its foray into the world of brawny compute with the immediate availability of the industry’s first fabric-based Intel® Xeon® micro server, the SM10000-XE™…a micro server that uses half the power and one-third the space, but for the first time is targeted at heavy weight workloads as opposed to the light weight ones that are traditionally associated with micro servers."

An alternative approach to "wimpy chips" is to use "wimpy cores" to build energy-efficient volume servers.

Products like these have the potential for a big impact on clouds' energy consumption and CO2e, but, given the 'brown' nature of today's clouds, data centers will still have to make sure the energy itself is as green as possible.