AMD announced that it has received the prestigious Asia Responsible Entrepreneurship Award (AREA) in the Green Leadership category for its 25×20 Energy Efficiency Initiative. The award was presented in Bangkok, Thailand on June 2, 2017. Starting from a 2014 baseline, AMD set a stretch goal to improve the energy efficiency of its mobile Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) 25 times by 2020.
“We are proud to receive AREA’s Green Leader award in recognition of our pursuit to build energy efficient, environmentally-friendly compute devices,” said Arvind Chandrasekar, director of government affairs at AMD. “Everyone at AMD, from the CEO at the top to our dedicated engineers in the lab, are invested in our commitment to building processors that push the envelope of energy efficiency.”
As a leading semiconductor company, AMD is committed to reducing the power consumption, energy costs and environmental impacts of computing devices while also improving compute performance. The AMD 25×20 initiative is also independently verified as a “science-based target” by the Science-based Targets Initiative (a partnership with United Nations Global Compact, World Wildlife Fund, World Resources Institute, and Climate Disclosure Project). This means countries and companies with climate protection commitments can upgrade to AMD-based notebook computers over time and be confident, those IT procurement decisions will help prevent the worse effects of climate change.
“We are completely focused on bringing to market, design innovation, intelligent power management systems, and advanced system architectures that will enable us to meet our stretch goal of 25 times improvement in energy efficiency from 2014 to 2020,” said Sam Naffziger, AMD corporate fellow and IEEE fellow. “If gains are more or less equal in power reduction and performance improvement, a notebook computer powered by AMD APU will accomplish a task in one fifth of the time compared to a similar notebook produced in 2014, while consuming on an average less than one fifth the power.”
The significant growth estimates of internet connected devices, which range from 20 to 30 billion by 2020, reflect the important role of energy efficiency. For example, an AMD study on the 6th Generation AMD APU found power consumption and carbon emissions from computer use reduced up to 50 percent from the previous generation.
In the coming months, AMD will launch its 8th Generation AMD APU, Ryzen Mobile. AMD estimates this APU will achieve a 50 percent increase in CPU performance, over 40 percent better graphics performance, and a 50 percent decrease in power use compared to the previous generation.
As AMD continues to pursue the 25×20 goal for mobile APUs, the company is also designing other energy efficient products. For example, an AMD study on its Radeon RX 480 graphics processing units (GPUs) used in enthusiast gaming computers demonstrated up to 40 percent reduction in energy and GHG emissions compared to the previous generation.
