Can you code green (or "green" code)? Microsoft seems to think so. InformationWeek's Nicholas Hoover reports on an interesting whitepaper issued by the company.

Microsoft compared power consumption between two installations on the same server with two dual-core processors and 4 GB of RAM, one running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition with SP2 plus hot fixes, and the other running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, with a hard drive formatting in between.

The company found that Windows Server 2003 used as much as 10% more power despite only being able to deliver 80% of the maximum throughput as its successor. Microsoft attributes these improvements partially to power management features that Windows Server 2008 has enabled by default, like the automatic adjustment of processor performance based on workload.

If the same can be observed in the wild, then kudos to the Windows Server team. Hoover points out, though, that when you toss virtualization in the mix, things get somewhat murkier.