The Business Applications Performance Corporation or BAPCo today announced a joint venture with Ecma International to develop a new benchmark that examines performance-qualified energy efficiency of personal computers. BAPCo also invites third parties to take part in the development process of the benchmark to be called EECoMark.

EECoMark is intended to be used as a tool to measure the performance-qualified energy consumption of personal computers “using real world applications”. In developing EECoMark, BAPCo and Ecma will go beyond synthetic component measurements to examine the energy consumption of the entire computer through the use of proven workload development methodologies, the companies indicated. EECoMark will be the first implementation of the upcoming Ecma energy efficiency standard for computers.

Personal computers and servers have been gaining computing power rapidly throughout the history. But in addition to performance, their power consumption and heat dissipation have been increasing tremendously, which means that operators of servers have to design appropriate cooling technologies and pay higher electricity bills. This year AMD with Sun called the industry to develop a benchmark to measure energy efficiency of computers and SPEC is already in process of such development.

BAPCo and Ecma respectively intend to release the first version of EECoMark and the Energy Efficiency Standard in the first half of 2008.