AMD’s latest computer processor reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent compared to the previous generation processor, according to an AMD carbon footprint analysis.
AMD says this shows its business clients can reduce the environmental footprint of their technology and lower operating costs, while improving performance and efficiency. Some 60 percent of Fortune 100 companies have established public targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report by Ceres and WWF.
The computer processor supplier conducted a carbon footprint analysis of its sixth-generation A-Series accelerated processing unit (APU), codenamed “Carrizo.” The analysis found that an enterprise customer upgrading 100,000 notebooks from the prior generation to the AMD A-Series APU could save an estimated 4.9 million kilowatt hours of electricity — or roughly $495,000 — and 3,350 metric tons of CO2 over a three-year product service life.
The study results are based on the widely accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol established by the World Resources Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
In 2014 AMD announced a goal of improving the typical use energy efficiency of its mobile APUs by 25 times by 2020, from a 2014 baseline. Meeting the 25x20 target requires increasing the pace of efficiency gains by using new power management features and innovative designs.
The energy efficiency improvements needed to achieve this goal outpace the historical efficiency trend predicted by Moore’s Law by at least 70 percent. That means that in 2020 a computer could accomplish a task in one-fifth the time of a personal computer in 2014 while consuming on average less than one fifth the power.
The sixth-generation AMD A-Series APU is the first product introduced under the 25x20 initiative.