Microsoft has finally told the world and its dog that it has been using Intel' Atom's in its cunning experiment to create green data centres using netbook chips.

The world was all a flutter last week as Microsoft announced details about its top secret project to create datacentres based around netbook chips, however it failed to name which one it was using.

There was talk that the outfit might have been playing around with Chips from outside the Wintel alliance, which has been getting less and less stable these days. Now Microsoft has admitted that it was fooling around with the Atom computers so there was really no surprises. Jim Larus, director of software architecture at Microsoft Research, said the Atoms were not as powerful, so you may require many more of these servers in the data centres.

However, since each one consumes less energy, the data center as a whole can be more efficient and get more work done for the same amount of energy. A prototype server rack holds 50 Atom systems, which, because of the low heat generated by the Atom, doesn't require a powerful fan for cooling it.