AMD Beats 25x20 Goal for Mobile CPU Energy Efficiency

AMD has handily beaten its 2014 goal, known as "25x20," to make its mobile CPUs 25 times more energy efficient by the year 2020. The company says that the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H beat the company's baseline measurements by 31.7 times. 

The company didn't release any specific results, but listed that the new testing performed on April 15 with the baseline chip, the AMD FX-7600P, as well as numerous processors since, including the AMD FX-8800P, AMD FX-9830P, AMD Ryzen 7 2700U, AMD Ryzen 7 2800H, AMD Ryzen 7 3750H and AMD Ryzen 7 4800H. 

The 25x20 goal was compared to Energy Star revision 6.1 and used 3DMark 2011 P-Score and Cinebench R15 nT. 

In AMD's statement, Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at TIRIAS Research said that “[t]he 25x20 goal required major changes to architecture, design and software, and did not rely solely on silicon process technology advancements. Achieving and surpassing this challenging goal is a testament to the hard work the AMD team put into its products and it catapulted AMD to a leadership position in mobile processors.”

Additionally, AMD says that the improvements to its system-on-chip and power management features have reduced the average compute time for "a given task" by 80% from 2014 to 2020, a number it got by comparing a weighted metric combining Cinebench R15 and 3DMark 11 performance from a 2014 to a 2020 laptop. It claims that the uptick in compute comes with an 84% decrease in energy use.

In the past few years, AMD has become a leader on the process node, beating Intel to a denser node by opting for TSMC's 7nm. For performance, it has been adding cores to its mobile processors (and desktop, for that matter) and also moving to a chiplet design.