In the mobile computing space, a lot of emphasis have been given to power efficiency these days as processor makers and their OEM partners alike are looking into providing longer battery life for users to depend on without sacrificing performance. As for AMD, the company claimed that this has always been part of its focus for the longest time.
As proof, AMD stated that it has managed to achieve 10x improvement in power efficiency for the company’s mobile APU during the last six years; progressing from the Puma architecture in 2008 up to the recently launched Kaveri for mobile. That being said, the company aims to gain even more power efficiency for its APU in the not-so-distant future.
In what AMD dubbed as the “25×20” target, the amount of power efficiency gain that the company is expected to achieve by 2020 is 25-fold as compared to its existing standard. AMD believes that it is able to achieve this through three design strategies with one of them being the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) that the company has been championing for quite some time.
Through HSA, the CPU and GPU portion of an AMD APU are able to share the same memory pool which lead to reduced computer cycles. This in hand resulted in lower power consumption. At the same time, AMD is also looking into dynamic real-time power management that offers the ability for its APUs to get a task done as fast as they could in order to return to the low-power idle state as quickly as possible.
Last but not least, AMD is also looking on upcoming innovations in the power efficiency space that are still being worked on at this moment. These method include inter-frame power gating, per-part adaptive voltage, voltage islands, further integration of system components, and more.
While it is indeed interesting to hear that AMD is committed to increase the power efficiency of its upcoming APUs to benefit users but frankly speaking, what being mentioned above are still a matter of academics until they are fully realized and implemented into future AMD APUs. Nevertheless, do check out this white paper by TIRIAS Research in case you want to know the full details of AMD’s ambitious pursuit for power efficiency.
[Source : AMD]
