AMD: APUs to get 25x more efficient by 2020

While we are primarily interested in what AMD has to offer in the coming years, it seems the company is currently trying to woo investors with promises of big gains in energy efficiency by 2020. According to the chip designer, the energy efficiency of its APUs should increase by a massive 25-fold, outpacing historical energy efficiency gains by a whopping 70 percent.

AMD claims it will be able to do this via architectural innovation with heterogeneous compute support, focusing on typical-use power optimization through power management improvements and aggressive real-time optimizations and further integration with density scaling.

The company has goals in terms of energy efficiency, where it wants to have "more performance with less power", as well as "long battery life, sleek light weight form factors, cool and quiet computation" mixed with "lower energy consumption and utility bills, lower Total Cost of Ownership" and a "reduced environmental impact".

Using a comparison of a 35W notebook processor released this year, versus a 35W processor from two years ago, the new notebook processor is twice as fast. You can say that the energy efficiency has improved by 200% as well, but the older 35W processors no longer fit into notebooks. AMD needs to find a way to reduce power consumption, as well as increasing the performance of the processor. Up until now, we've seen Intel and AMD do one or the other, but not both to the extent of 200% leaps each time.

Source: TweakTown