14 DAY TRIAL // A little less than a month ago we brought you the first details about AMD's upcoming Power Express technology that functioned in a similar way to Nvidia's Optimus and was destined to be used in notebooks powered by AMD's discrete graphics card to lower the power consumption of the system, and, now, we are able to share with you more details about AMD's technology behind Power Express.
Introduced back in 2010, Optimus was one of the main reason why so many laptop makers decided to go with Nvidia discrete graphics cards for building their system as the technology allowed for on the fly switching between the integrated graphics and the discrete graphics card according to the tasks run.
This, in turn, improved the battery life of mobile systems as the dedicated video card was only used when graphics intensive tasks were run, while the integrated GPU was used for just about everything else.
Back then, AMD lacked a proper response to Optimus as its graphics switching technology relied on muxers, so users experienced screen flickering when changing from one card to another.
However, the forth version of the Power Express technology will get rid of this disadvantage and will bring AMD's mobile graphics solutions back on par with Nvidia's ones.
Further details about the Power Express 4.0 (also known as Bacon) are available through some leaked slides, that were posted online by Rage3D and describe the technology in detail.
According to the information provided, the technology works by allowing the dedicated GPU (dGPU) to enter into an advanced power saving mode, that has a power draw of around 150mw, and by monitoring the tasks run by the system via the Catalyst Control Center.
When a graphics heavy task is detected the dGPU is taken out of the power saving mode and used for rendering the images. These are pushed to the screen via the display engine of the iGPU using a technique called CrossDisplay by AMD.
The switch is almost instantaneous and adds only 150ms to the application start process.
The task list used by Power Express 4.0 to decide when to use the dGPU will be provided by AMD or the OEM and can also be customized by users according to their wishes.
Power Express 4.0 technology is compatible with the current Radeon HD 6000M solutions as well as with AMD's upcoming 28nm Radeon HD 7000M GPUs.
