I read Robert's post yesterday on the way companies are changing the way they measure performance from the current per-MHz/GHz to performance per watt. Robert's comments were based on the front page story yesterday, Power struggle: How IT managers cope with the data center power demands.

The result got me thinking about how we measure performance and what the yardstick should be.

My first comment is that power has long been a problem for data center managers, and I'm not going to repeat my own feelings and findings on the use (and often waste) of power, or the eco-friendly options that are available. I won't make the comment either about Sun's T1 CPU (Niagara) which was designed with high performance and low power requirements in mind and Sun's aptly named the servers CoolThreads. OK, I just made the comment anyway, but it nicely leads me on to part of the point I want to make.