The Global Climate Viewed from AMD's Angle

AMD just released is annual "Global Climate Protection Plan", in which the processor manufacturer underlines its work to reduce the power consumption and the development of additional power saving techniques that could be implemented in its processors. This trend to enable hardware power saving technologies inside AMD products seems to pay off since the report on the servers' energy consumption written by Neal Nelson & Associates places Opteron based servers in front of Intel's Xeon based ones in terms of energy efficiency. This provided an unexpected public relations boon for AMD, company that is currently passing through a hard period. An additional recognition by the site "Tom's Hardware", that overall AMD processors were more energy efficient that their Intel counterparts are, didn't hurt either.

Steve Groseclose, director of global environmental health and safety at AMD, was cited by the site Earth2Tech as saying "There's a lot of hype around climate protection now. Everybody is recognizing that they need to contribute to the solution and work together. We don't presume we are the answer within ourselves. [The report] is our recognition that we need to take a hard look to see what we can do on our own, whether it's work with others or our customers".

Among other things, the latest power consumption report that compares Intel and AMD processors looks at the planned energy saving features implemented in the upcoming Barcelona quad core processor. According to the same site, "These features include a "redesigned micro architecture that will enable new power- and thermal-management." Power management built into the chips will allow them to reduce voltage levels when the memory controller runs at full speed".

A number of important points inside the AMD climate report have been analyzed by the Earth2Tech, which highlights some of them. First, the acquisition of video chips producer ATI is a milestone in AMD's path to implement energy efficient hardware parts in both processors and video cards. Secondly, the processor manufacturer is expecting that all desktop and mobile computer systems that will integrate an AMD processor to be compliant with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ENERGY STAR Version 4.0. Another point is that the jump from DDR1 memory modules to the new standard DDR2 is a step forward in terms of energy efficiency as the DDR2 memory needs 30 percent less power than the old DDR1 needed and 58 percent less than another new memory technology used by Intel servers, the FBDIMM, did.