The rise of cloud computing is going to stoke demand for servers, according to a new forecast from IDC. For me, the critical point is that public cloud providers such as Google don’t buy servers, they build them. And the design decisions they make - constructing sparsely configured but powerful scale-out servers - will feed back into the enterprise market.

The raw numbers of which they speak are as follows: "Server revenue for public cloud computing will grow from  USD 582 million in 2009 to USD 718 million in 2014. Server revenue for the much larger private cloud market will grow from USD 7.3 billion to USD 11.8 billion in the same time period."

When you consider that the overall server market was around USD 44 billion in 2009, the qualitative takeaway is that the public-cloud portion amounts to a spring rain shower. However, I believe the influence of this sector will be disproportionately large. Here's why:

The server market for public cloud vendors such as Google and Amazon is a hidden market. These guys don’t go out and buy in bulk from Dell or HP. They roll their own, and the own that they roll are highly, highly, highly efficient designs. They strip their blades of all extraneous components and outfit them with nothing but the bare necessities. So if taking out a USB port saves USD 5 and a couple of watts of power, that’s how the system is configured.

What's also not obvious to the public is that the Googles of the world exert influence on the server design arena right at the source. Namely, they go directly to Intel and AMD and tell them stuff they'd like to see in terms of TDP (processor power dissipation), power management, price/performance, etc. Since a Google can buy upwards of 10,000 of a processor SKU, Intel and AMD listen.