Hewlett-Packard announced the introduction this week of two new business-oriented PC desktops with ultra-energy efficient designs, one of them including a solid-state hard drive to completely eliminate drive motor demand. As more and more corporations began to realize that the electricity expenditure driving their computers is not insignificant, this is a well-timed move to get ahead of the market in offering green business computers.

There is probably a financial as well as a philosophical argument to be made as to whether it is more appropriate to reduce costs by buying green PCs or by moving toward low-energy thin-clients and consolidating the requisite computing capacity on the back-end (the advantage to the thin-client approach being that the horsepower for high-end operations can be made available more efficiently in a large-scale, shared architecture) but leaving all that aside for the moment, it seems obvious that something more than lip service will be required to actually reduce corporate electric consumption. New hardware is exactly what is necessary.

There's no real reason now why business desktops should be packing in such monstrous, electricity hungry processors and components as most of them do; the cutting-edge processors, drives, and video cards are driven primarily by the hobbyist and gaming market, which uses them to their limit. But even running Vista, the average business desktop typically uses less than a quarter of its total capacity performing most common business tasks. If you do manage to max out the capacity, chances are you wouldn't notice the difference between 100% utilization on a high-end chip and a low-end chip... Word still types as fast as you type (for the most part; but those problems aren't ones that a processor bump will fix). All that extra horsepower, which is already paid for, sits idle most of the time and simply wastes electricity the rest of the time.

The solid-state hard drive is a bit gimmicky at this point, and carries a correspondingly high price point (around $1200, versus the more typical $500 for the other energy-efficient model being offered), but in fact most machines will go this route eventually... if not for energy efficiency, which is nothing to sneeze at, then for reliability. No moving parts means no losing battle with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

HP may be slightly ahead of their market here, particularly considering the pricing, but as CIOs and CFOs do the math, they are getting into a product line that is bound to take off at some point.