AMD Announces Initiative for Energy Efficiency

Company commits to 30x efficiency increase for EPYC CPUs by 2025.

Chip maker AMD has announced a bold initiative to deliver a 30x increase in energy efficiency for the AMD EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators for AI and HPC applications by 2025. According to the press release, the ambitious effort will require the company to “...increase the energy efficiency of a compute node at a rate that is more than 2.5x faster than the aggregate industry-wide improvement made during the last five years.”

The announcement is part of the new goals embodied in AMD’s Environmental Social Governance (ESG) initiative. The company describes the goals in terms of social responsibility, but the initiative wouldn’t happen if it didn’t also make business sense. Power usage has long been a limitation for HPC systems, and AMD is always looking for an edge -- something to specialize in to distinguish them from Intel. Meanwhile, energy-efficient ARM processors continue to challenge the HPC space.

See the full announcement at the AMD website.