AMD Reports To Beat Renoir APU’s 2014 25×20 Efficiency Target

AMD claims to have surpassed an efficiency target for mobile APUs 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 is 31.7 times more efficient than a 2014 Kaveri generation APU. Dating back to AMD’s 25×20 Energy Efficiency Initiative, the goal was to increase energy efficiency by a factor of 20 by 2020. 25 to improve. This concerns the ratio between the performance of the CPU and the GPU, and the consumption of the APUs.

At Kaveri, that relationship was not good. With the succeeding 2015 Carrizo generation, AMD made a big leap and especially Raven Ridge in 2017 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.

Things got a little rough after that, despite the transition from a 14nm to a 12nm production process and from Zen to the optimized Zen+ architecture for the chips. Last year, however, AMD 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 on the way.

That expectation was fulfilled and AMD succeeded, among other things, because it uses the 7nm chip node instead of the 14nm process for the Renoir generation of 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 clarifies that AMD comes to its claims by measuring the performance of the CPU with Cinebench R15 and the GPU with 3DMark 11, and averaging them in equal proportion. That number C is divided by the E, which stands for the energy consumption, defined by ETEC Energy Star as ‘energy consumption of laptops’. The consumption during workloads, sleep mode and idle mode is 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 from the Kaveri generation and a Ryzen 7 4800H with a tdp of 35W from the Renoir APUs. For the coming years, AMD is working on a broader objective that also includes environmental effects, for example.