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Posted by DanceswithUnix - Fri 20 Jun 2014 14:55
What now takes 250W you will be able to do in 10W? That doesn't make sense.

What you can now do in 2.5W you will be able to do in 100mW? Maybe, but with the backlight on who much cares.
Posted by watercooled - Fri 20 Jun 2014 15:28
Well it's a fairly ambiguous claim - if they're referring to platform power, the industry has already made some significant improvements there over the past few years but there's still some room to go, especially on the desktop where power efficiency seems to be an afterthought at best on a lot of motherboards.

They could also be talking about specific areas like media, where hardware/GPU/DSP processing can be massively more efficient than CPU processing - the 2.5W to 100mW is already possible with stuff like video codecs, moving from software to dedicated logic. This sort of thing would tie into the HSA direction - maybe we'll see more of the sort of stuff we're used to seeing in mobile ARM SoCs start to appear in desktop/laptop processors?
Posted by sam3 - Fri 20 Jun 2014 15:47
“AMD has managed to improve the typical energy efficiency of its mobile processors by more than 10x”

It looks like their target will be 2.5x its current efficiency (as they are already on 10x - to make 25x total)
Posted by xslavic - Fri 20 Jun 2014 16:48
..i guess it means that the ratio of the (CPU x performance + the Gpu x performance)/watt will be bigger by 25 times,so cpu maybe +10% + gpu y% total divided by the power consumed will have that effect and maybe twice than ARMS and Intels at that level.Thats what i understood form the sentence.
Posted by wasabi - Fri 20 Jun 2014 16:50
Also got to remember Moore's law means you're in effect doubling the transistor count every two years anyway - or at least the competition will be. So you in effect are going to get a X8 performance boost IF power draw stays constant. So really they're talking about dropping power to 1/3 of current levels - then multiply that 1/3 by 8 to get 24X, if you see what I mean. Yes, it is back of envvelope maths.
Posted by valhar2000 - Fri 20 Jun 2014 18:17
DanceswithUnix
What now takes 250W you will be able to do in 10W? That doesn't make sense.

Possibly. That would mean that, in six years, a low power APU will have the performance of 2 or 3 of today's high-end AMD APUs. An very ambitious goal, certainly, but not science-fiction.
Posted by benegerton1985 - Sat 21 Jun 2014 08:40
Well I certainly believe they can get close, the difference they made in efficiency between the Trinity and Richland APU's I own is fantastic, and they both use the same architecture! If I look at the p-states for both chips, a Trinity chip requires 0.9v to be at it's lowest p-state at 1.4Ghz and Richland requires 0.325v to be at 1.8Ghz. No idea about Kaveri however but I presume the difference between Kaveri and it's successor based on the same architecture would be similar again.
Posted by Zak33 - Thu 25 Jun 2020 15:43
2020 update :

AMD have exceeded that target from 6 years ago!

https://hexus.net/tech/news/industry/143740-amd-revisits-25x20-efficiency-goal-says-excelled/
Posted by Corky34 - Thu 25 Jun 2020 16:45
That's some serious memory you have there. :)

I was about to make a fool of myself and say the year in the article was wrong. :confused:
Posted by Zak33 - Fri 26 Jun 2020 10:38
I think its quite an achievment, and remember at the time thinking “go on then…crack on” as my own AMD experiences were of low power use (on cpu…)
Posted by Xlucine - Sun 28 Jun 2020 15:12
DanceswithUnix
What now takes 250W you will be able to do in 10W? That doesn't make sense.

What you can now do in 2.5W you will be able to do in 100mW? Maybe, but with the backlight on who much cares.

Didn't make sense in 2014, but they've managed it :D

The 9590 (OK, not the best example of power efficiency) is about half the speed of a 4800U in cinebench R15, and that's almost a 250 to 10 W comparison