According The Green Grid officials attending the Next Gen Data Center conference in San Francisco this week, the SPEC server power benchmark will be announced next month. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) is a nonprofit industry group that measures server performance. The SPEC power committee — which includes Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. — will release its findings to the EPA in September and the benchmark will serve as the basis of the EPA’s EnergyStar rating for servers.

The new SPECpower metric will measure the amount of energy it takes for various servers to perform a set unit of work. The first workload that SPEC will measure is server side Java. The energy measurements are made at the AC input to the system under test.