Intel is looking to please the performance per watt crowd, particularly in datacenter environments, with this week's shipment of their new low-power quad-core Xeon. The new chip, despite having four cores, has a peak TDP of a mere 50 watts. In comparison, many single core mobile processors have a TDP as high as 35W. This is a huge improvement, not only over their first line of quad cores, but also over their CPUs over the past few years. Their existing quad cores need as much as 120W.
With configurations like that, a server could have eight cores running on less power than it took two just a year ago.