AMD reports Renoir-apu’s 2014 25×20 efficiency target to exceed – Computer – News

AMD claims to have more than achieved an efficiency target for mobile apus that it formulated in 2014 with its Renoir apus. The goal was to improve processor efficiency by a factor of 25 by 2020.

AMD reports that a Renoir apu 31.7 times more efficient is like an apu of the 2014 Kaveri generation. The 25×20 Energy Efficiency Initiative of AMD dates from that time and the aim was to improve energy efficiency by a factor of 25 by 2020. This concerns the ratio between the performance of the CPU and the GPU, and the consumption of the APUs.

At Kaveri that ratio was not the best. With the subsequent 2015 Carrizo generation, AMD made a big leap, and Raven Ridge in 2017 in particular kept AMD on track to easily meet its target. At Raven Ridge, AMD used Zen cores and Vega GPUs. This allowed it to double the amount of cores without increasing consumption compared to predecessor Bristol Ridge.

After that, things got a little rough, despite the transition from a 14nm to a 12nm production process and from Zen to the optimized Zen + architecture for the chips. Last year AMD nevertheless expressed its expectation that it would meet its 25×20 target, thanks to the improvements it had made at Picasso and the improvements that were still to come.

That expectation was fulfilled and AMD succeeded in part because it used the 7nm chip node instead of the 14nm process for the Renoir-generation TSMCs and switched from Zen + to Zen2. This was again accompanied by a doubling of the number of cores, from four to eight, and an improvement in the IPC, or the number of instructions per cycle.

AnandTech clarified that AMD comes to its claims by measuring the performance of the CPU with Cinebench R15 and the GPU with 3DMark 11, averaging it and taking it into account in an equal proportion. That number C is divided by the E, which stands for energy consumption, defined by ETEC Energy Star as ‘laptop energy consumption’. Consumption during workloads, sleep mode and idle mode is also taken into account. AMD uses its own reference platforms for these measurements and has provided data to AnandTech to verify its claims.

AMD used an FX-7600P of the Kaveri generation and a Ryzen 7 4800H of the Renoir apus with a tdp of 35W. For the coming years, AMD is working on a broader objective that also includes the environmental effects.

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