AMD Accelerates Energy Efficiency of APUs, Details Plans to Deliver 25x Efficiency Gains by 2020
June 19 2014 - 12:01AM
Marketwired
AMD Accelerates Energy Efficiency of APUs, Details Plans to Deliver
25x Efficiency Gains by 2020
Design Optimizations, Intelligent Power Management and
Heterogeneous System Architecture Advances to Enable AMD to Outpace
Historical Energy Efficiency Trend by at Least 70 Percent
DALIAN, CHINA--(Marketwired - Jun 19, 2014) - China
International Software and Information Service Fair -- AMD (NYSE:
AMD) today announced its goal to deliver a 25x improvement in the
energy efficiency of its Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) by
2020.1 Details including innovations that will produce the expected
efficiency gains were presented today by AMD's Chief Technology
Officer Mark Papermaster during a keynote at the China
International Software and Information Service Fair (CISIS)
conference in Dalian, China. The "25X20" target is a
substantial increase compared to the prior six years (2008 to
2014), during which time AMD improved the typical use energy
efficiency of its products more than 10x.1
Worldwide, three billion personal computers use more than one
percent of all energy consumed annually, and 30 million computer
servers use an additional 1.5 percent of all electricity consumed
at an annual cost of $14 billion to $18 billion USD. Expanded use
of the Internet, mobile devices, and interest in cloud-based video
and audio content in general is expected to result in all of those
numbers increasing in future years.2
"Creating differentiated low-power products is a key element of
our business strategy, with an attending relentless focus on energy
efficiency," said Papermaster. "Through APU architectural
enhancements and intelligent power efficient techniques, our
customers can expect to see us dramatically improve the energy
efficiency of our processors during the next several years. Setting
a goal to improve the energy efficiency of our processors 25 times
by 2020 is a measure of our commitment and confidence in our
approach."
"The energy efficiency of information technology has improved at
a rapid pace since the beginning of the computer age, and
innovations in semiconductor technologies continue to open up new
possibilities for higher efficiency," said Dr. Jonathan Koomey,
research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and
Finance at Stanford University. "AMD has steadily improved the
energy efficiency of its mobile processors, having achieved greater
than a 10-fold improvement over the last six years in typical-use
energy efficiency. AMD's focus on improving typical power
efficiency will likely yield significant consumer benefits
substantially improving real-world battery life and performance for
mobile devices. AMD's technology plans show every promise of
yielding about a 25-fold improvement in typical-use energy
efficiency for mobile devices over the next six years, a pace that
substantially exceeds historical rates of growth in peak output
energy efficiency. This would be achieved through both
performance gains and rapid reductions in the typical-use power of
processors. In addition to the benefits of increased performance,
the efficiency gains help to extend battery life, enable
development of smaller and less material intensive devices, and
limit the overall environmental impact of increased numbers of
computing devices."
Moore's Law states that the number of transistors capable of
being built in a given area doubles roughly every two
years. Dr. Koomey's research demonstrates that historically,
energy efficiency of processors has closely tracked the rate of
improvement predicted by Moore's Law.3 Through intelligent power
management and APU architectural advances, in tandem with
semiconductor manufacturing process technology improvements and a
focus on typical use power, AMD's expects its energy efficiency
achievements to outpace the historical efficiency trend
predicted by Moore's law by at least 70 percent between 2014 and
2020.
Architecting for Energy-Efficiency Leadership Like advances in
computing performance, advances in power efficiency have
historically come along with new generations of silicon process
technology that shrink the size of each individual transistor. AMD
expects to outpace the power efficiency gains expected from process
technology transitions through 2020 for typical use based on
successfully executing three central pillars of the company's
energy efficient design strategy:
- Heterogeneous-computing and power optimization: Through
Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), AMD combines CPU and
GPU compute cores and special purpose accelerators such as
digital signal processors and video encoders on the same chip
in the form of APUs. This innovation from AMD saves energy by
eliminating connections between discrete chips, reduces
computing cycles by treating the CPU and GPU as peers, and
enables the seamless shift of computing workloads to
the optimal processing component. The result is improved
energy efficiency and accelerated performance for common
workloads, including standard office applications as well as
emerging visually oriented and interactive workloads such as
natural user interfaces and image and speech recognition. AMD
provides APUs with HSA features to the embedded, server and
client device markets, and its semi-custom APUs are inside the
new generation of game consoles.
- Intelligent, real-time power management: Most computing
operation is characterized by idle time, the interval between
keystrokes, touch inputs or time reviewing displayed content.
Executing tasks as quickly as possible to hasten a return
to idle, and then minimizing the power used at idle is
extremely important for managing energy consumption. Most
consumer-oriented tasks such as web browsing, office document
editing, and photo editing benefit from this "race to idle"
behavior. The latest AMD APUs perform real-time analysis on
the workload and applications, dynamically adjusting clock
speed to achieve optimal throughput rates. Similarly, AMD offers
platform aware power management where the processor can
overclock to quickly get the job done, then drop back into
low-power idle mode.
- Future innovations in power-efficiency: Improvements in
efficiency require technology development that takes many years to
complete. AMD recognized the need for energy efficiency years
ago and made the research investments that have since led to high
impact features. Going forward many differentiating capabilities
such as Inter-frame power gating, per-part adaptive voltage,
voltage islands, further integration of system components, and
other techniques still in the development stage should yield
accelerated gains.
Industry analyst firm TIRIAS Research recently reviewed AMD's
methodology for measuring its energy efficiency and the plans to
achieve a 25x improvement by 2020 and produced a publicly-available
white paper detailing their analysis.
"The goal of an energy-efficient processor is to deliver more
performance than the prior generation at the same or less power,"
said Kevin Krewell, analyst at TIRIAS Research. "AMD's plan to
accelerate the energy-efficiency gains for its mobile-computing
processors is impressive. We believe that AMD will achieve its
energy efficiency goal, partially through process improvement but
mostly by combining the savings from reducing idle power, the
performance boost of heterogeneous system architecture, and through
more intelligent power management. With this undertaking, AMD
demonstrates leadership in the computing industry, driving
innovations for a more energy-efficient future."
Supporting Resources
- TIRIAS Research white paper
- Become a fan of AMD on Facebook
- Follow @AMD on Twitter
- Join AMD on Google Plus
About AMD AMD (NYSE: AMD) designs and integrates technology that
powers millions of intelligent devices, including personal
computers, tablets, game consoles and cloud servers that define the
new era of surround computing. AMD solutions enable people
everywhere to realize the full potential of their favorite devices
and applications to push the boundaries of what is possible. For
more information, visit www.amd.com.
1 Based on typical-use Energy Efficiency as defined by taking
the ratio of compute capability as measured by common performance
measures such as SpecIntRate, PassMark and PCMark, divided by
typical energy use as defined by metrics such as ETEC (Typical
Energy Consumption for notebook computers) as specified in Energy
Star Program Requirements Rev 6.0 10/2013
2 Energy-efficient computing, The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI);
https://mitei.mit.edu/news/energy-efficient-computing
3 Assessing Trends in The Electrical Efficiency of Computation
Over Time, Koomey:
https://www.llnl.gov/news/aroundthelab/2010/Nov/attach/koomeyoncomputingtrends-v5.pdf
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