In 2014, AMD announced an ambitious goal to increase the energy efficiency of its mobile processors by 25 times in six years. At the time, research pointed to energy efficiency developments following a similar pace to that of Moore"s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be packed in a given area doubles every two years. For energy efficiency, Koomey"s Law predicts that energy efficiency doubles every year and a half. AMD expected to outpace the numbers suggested by this research by at least 70% between 2014 and 2020.
As ambitious as that plan was, though, AMD seems to have exceeded its own goals. Today, the company announced that its latest Ryzen CPUs, specifically the Ryzen 7 4800H, is 31.7 times more efficient than its baseline measurements from 2014. Commenting on the achievement, AMD Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Mark Papermaster, said:
“We have always focused on energy efficiency in our processors, but in 2014 we decided to put even greater emphasis on this capability (...). Our engineering team rallied around the challenge and charted a path to reach our stretch goal of 25 times greater energy efficiency by 2020. We were able to far surpass our objective, achieving 31.7 times improvement leading to gaming and ultrathin laptops with unmatched performance, graphics and long battery life. I could not be prouder of our engineering and business teams.”
Naturally, more energy efficiency means more capabilities while consuming less energy, extending battery life and reducing the environmental impact of PCs. AMD says it reduced the compute time for a given task by 80% on average between 2014 and 2020, while also lowering energy consumption by 84%. As AMD puts it:
That means an enterprise that upgrades 50,000 AMD laptops from 2014 models to 2020 models would achieve five times more computing performance and reduce associated laptop energy consumption by 84%, which over a three-year service life amounts to saving approximately 1.4 million kilowatt hours of electricity and 971,000 kg of carbon emissions, equal to 16,000 trees grown for 10 years.
As many tech companies pledge to neutralize their carbon emissions and reduce their environmental impact, AMD"s news shows promise for environment-friendly PCs.