There are three main approaches to lowering the power requirements of your computing equipment:

Power-saving equipment

The Sun Niagara T1 CPU, Intel's Core Duo and Core 2 Duo series, VIAs Eden/C7 CPUs, IBMsX3 chipset and AMDs Cool'N'Quiet technology all aim to provide the same processing power, while using significantly less electrical power in the process.

The chips use different technologies - the T1 uses a high number of cores and execution units with a lower speed to provide equivalent power, Intel and AMD uses a variety of power switching and speed stepping technology to lower the overall power requirements, particularly effective in the Opteron CPU used in many servers. IBM's X3 uses the better conductivity of copper and Silicone-on-insulator (SoI) technology to get better power usage out of their CPUs and chipsets.