14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices is well aware of the energy efficiency craze, like the rest of us, and we dare say it has been quite successful in cutting power requirements for its CPUs, or, well, APUs. The company seems to think it hasn't been moving fast enough though.
Between 2008 and 2014, the energy efficiency of AMD's products increased by an average 10x, meaning that today's GPUs (graphics processing units) and APUs (accelerated processing units) work on a tenth of the energy needed back then.
According to Moore's Law, the number of transistors that can be built on a chip doubles every two years without adding to the price of the chip.
Dr. Jonathan Koomey, research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University, has conducted an investigation that showed energy efficiency advancing at a similar pace.
However, intelligent power management and APU architectural advancements, plus the natural benefits of better semiconductor manufacturing technologies, have led to a faster progress on that front.
Thus, AMD expects its processors and other products to grow in energy efficiency faster than in performance from now on. Case in point, it expects to make its APUs 25x more efficient by 2020. A significant improvement over the 10x advancement of the past six years.
You might not find this all that important, until you think about how many computers exist in the world, and the impact they have on power grids.
Right now, about three billion personal computers use 1% of all the energy consumed per year, while 30 million servers eat up 1.5% more.
Internet use, cloud servers and all the mobile devices worldwide will add to that load significantly over the next decade. AMD has the right idea here.
The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) will be further refined, for one thing. Combining CPU and GPU cores with digital signal processors and video encoders on the same chip has already eliminated energy consumption normally demanded by connections between discrete chips. The reduction in computing cycles also helps.
Intelligent, real-time power management will be refined as well, executing tasks as quickly as possible so that the PC may return to the low-power, idle state sooner. APUs already perform real-time analysis of the workload and dynamically adjust clock speed, but improvements are always possible.
"Creating differentiated low-power products is a key element of our business strategy, with an attending relentless focus on energy efficiency," said AMD's Chief Technology Officer Mark 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."