AMD APUs to Become Efficient Faster Than Moore's Law
Wow. AMD is ambitious.
Rather than announcing a new product, AMD has announced a new target called the 25X20. The idea behind it is APU efficiency.
So what exactly does the target entail? Well, AMD wants its APUs to be 25 times more efficient by the year 2020. The company indicated that over the last six years (an equal time period from today till 2020), its products became about ten times more efficient. The company also recognized that if such improvements take place, the company will be outpacing Moore's law by about 70 percent.
"Creating differentiated low-power products is a key element of our business strategy, with an attending relentless focus on energy efficiency," said Papermaster. "Through APU architectural enhancements and intelligent power efficient techniques, our customers can expect to see us dramatically improve the energy efficiency of our processors during the next several years. Setting a goal to improve the energy efficiency of our processors 25 times by 2020 is a measure of our commitment and confidence in our approach."
Of course, energy efficiency should not be confused with power consumption. It is very unreasonable to expect the APUs to use 25 times less power six years from now. Instead, they will become more powerful and consume less energy while doing so, improving the overall performance per watt. That is AMD's target -- improving performance per watt by a multiple of 25.
Now, we're not exactly sure about how AMD intends to outpace science, though the company does mention three core foci: heterogeneous computing and power optimization, where the GPU and CPU aboard the APU work more closely together; intelligent real-time power management; and future innovation in power efficiency. In short, not only will the company shrink the transistors to make for more efficient APUs, it'll also work on newer architectures and better power management, and maybe even more.
There has to be something that gives AMD the confidence to make an announcement as ambitious as this… We're curious what it is that AMD has up its sleeve.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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burkhartmj This article leaves me confused on 2 points.Reply
A] last time I checked, Moore's law was about transistor count doubling every 2 years. While related to power efficiency, it's by no means a linear correlation from my understanding.
B] Moore's Law is an observational law. Sure, it's held true up to this point, but it's not some scientific wall like the speed of light or something, it can be outpaced. -
everygamer They might not have a plan, sometimes people and companies set goals just to motivate. Think about it this way, set the bar at x25, they just did x10 over the last 10 year's, if they hit x15 in the next 10 year's it's still an improvement.Reply -
bemused_fred "There has to be something that gives AMD the confidence to make an announcement as ambitious as this… We're curious what it is that AMD has up its sleeve."Reply
Oooh! Oooh! Is it....more cores? -
ferooxidan "Creating differentiated low-power products is a key element of our business strategy, ...."Reply
more like low performance product. sigh.....Come Broadwell and destroy AMD, so ATI can be ATI again and no more AMD. If things continue like this, even budget consumer will pick Intel when building budget pc, even their APU is not popular on notebook market. May be consider to make mobile cpu and stick with that, APU so so performance but great graphic performance is perfect for tablet, not for PC. -
utengineer Dear AMD,Reply
Call me when you embed a 295x2 on-die with the CPU. IN-TEL then, we are still trying to make Bulldozer run uphill.
Sincerely,
Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation -
ZolaIII Dire Intel,Reply
a die size of i7 quad core Haswell with graphics = 2154 cortex M4 cores (base implementation with DSP 65K gates).
Dire AMD you can achieve much more by tomorrow's lunch time if you drop x86 architecture. -
InvalidError Reply
An M4 core alone is not going to do you much good without the IGP, IO controllers and other support circuitry. It also won't give you much general-purpose compute performance without cache memory, superscalar and out-of-order execution. Add all those missing bits back in and the gap shrinks drastically.13570018 said:Dire Intel,
a die size of i7 quad core Haswell with graphics = 2154 cortex M4 cores (base implementation with DSP 65K gates).
Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips are around 110sqmm while Intel's Haswell core is 177sqmm. The performance gap between the two is far wider than the die size gap. -
bluestar2k11 "Come Broadwell and destroy AMD, so ATI can be ATI again and no more AMD."Reply
If i'm not much mistaken, ATi is AMD, so to make AMD fail would be to make Ati fail, and both would cease to be. In the case AMD pulled out of the CPU market they would still be AMD making ATi cards, and all notebooks would be stuck with crappy intel graphics.
Lastly, if i'm not much mistaken, intel and amd cross license instruction sets, specifically the x86 to AMD, and the x64 to intel. If AMD closed, it's likely your intel chip might mean next to nothing when they're forced to discontinue x64 instruction sets in their next line of CPU's until they create their own (If they can do so without infringing on AMD's design), as it isn't likely AMD would sell them.