How AMD Is Advancing Product Energy Efficiency

At AMD, we strive to create products that improve people’s lives and help our customers and end users reduce their own energy use and GHG emissions. We collaborate closely with our customers and partners on product design and system-level optimizations to advance environmental sustainability, including by reducing environmental impacts and energy use.

Increasing the computing performance delivered per watt of energy consumed is a vital aspect of our business strategy. Based on engagements with our customers, while product energy efficiency is not as significant a driver of demand for our products as total cost of ownership as well as compute performance, our customers recognize the role that energy efficiency may play in total cost of ownership over time. In addition, many of our customers have energy efficiency and GHG emissions goals of their own. Our products’ cutting-edge chip architecture, design, and power management features have resulted in significant energy efficiency gains. Global electricity consumption trends show a collective trajectory to consume more energy than the market can support within the next two decades.ⁱ The need for innovative energy solutions is becoming increasingly important – perhaps nowhere more so than in the data center.

AMD EPYC™ processors power some of the most energy efficient x86 servers, delivering exceptional performance and reducing energy costs.ⁱⁱ These AMD powered servers can meet performance demands with fewer physical servers, which can result in a reduced data center footprint and associated energy use and GHG emissions.

For example, achieving the same amount of compute (10,000 units of integer performance) is estimated to require 11 Intel servers (2P 60 core Xeon Platinum 8490H CPUs) or six AMD servers (2P 96 core 9654 EPYC CPUs).ⁱⁱⁱ The difference of five servers amounts to estimated operational savings of up to 45% less power, which over a three-year period can avoid up to 107 metric tons of CO2e and up to $37,700 in energy costs. This does not include the environmental and financial benefits of avoiding the extraction, manufacturing, shipping, and end of life management of the five servers that are not needed due to higher performance of the AMD solution.

Energy efficiency is paramount when it comes to workloads that require more compute performance, such as AI and supercomputing, which is the concentration of processing power across multiple parallel computers. This is why we set a bold goal to achieve a 30x improvement in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators powering HPC and AI training by 2025.iv If all AI and HPC server nodes globally were to make similar gains to the AMD 30x25 goal, we estimate billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity could be saved in 2025, relative to baseline trends.^iv Achieving the goal would also mean we would accelerate past the industry trendline at 2.5 times the rate of 2015-2020, as measured by the worldwide energy consumption for these computing segments and reducing energy use per computation by up to 97% as compared to 2020. When creating the goal, AMD worked with the renowned compute energy efficiency researcher and author Dr. Jonathan Koomey to validate the goal measurement methodology.

As of late 2023, we achieved a 13.5x improvement in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators from the 2020 baseline, using a configuration of four AMD Instinct™ MI300A APUs (4th Gen AMD EPYC™ CPU with AMD CDNA™ 3 Compute Units).^v We will continue to report our progress toward this goal. We are also proud that AMD powers 157 of the most energy efficient supercomputers, including the majority of the top 50, according to the Green500 List published in June 2024.^vi

Learn more about our energy efficiency goals and data center sustainability efforts at https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/corporate-responsibility/data-center-sustainability.html. 

Originally published in AMD 2023-24 Corporate Responsibility Report. 

ⁱ “The Decadal Plan for Semiconductors,” Semiconductor Research Corporation, https://www.src.org/about/decadal-plan/ (accessed May 15, 2024).

ⁱⁱ EPYC-028D: SPECpower_ssj® 2008, SPECrate®2017_int_energy_base, and SPECrate®2017_fp_energy_base based on results published on SPEC’s website as of 2/21/24. VMmark® server power-performance/server and storage power-performance (PPKW) based results published at https://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results3x.1.html?sort=score. The first 105 ranked SPECpower_ssj®2008 publications with the highest overall efficiency overall ssj_ops/W results were all powered by AMD EPYC processors. For SPECrate®2017 Integer (Energy Base), AMD EPYC CPUs power the first 8 top SPECrate®2017_int_energy_base performance/system W scores. For SPECrate®2017 Floating Point (Energy Base), AMD EPYC CPUs power the first 12 SPECrate®2017_fp_energy_base performance/system W scores. For VMmark® server power-performance (PPKW), have the top 5 results for 2- and 4-socket matched pair results outperforming all other socket results and for VMmark® server and storage power-performance (PPKW), have the top overall score. See https://www.amd.com/en/claims/epyc4#faq-EPYC-028D for the full list. For additional information on AMD sustainability goals see: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/corporate-responsibility/data-center-sustainability.html. More information about SPEC® is available at http://www.spec.org. SPEC, SPECrate, and SPECpower are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. VMmark is a registered trademark of VMware in the US or other countries.

ⁱⁱⁱ SP5TCO-034: This scenario contains many assumptions and estimates and, while based on AMD internal research and best approximations, should be considered an example for information purposes only, and not used as a basis for decision making over actual testing. The Bare Metal Server Greenhouse Gas Emissions TCO (total cost of ownership) Estimator Tool - version 6.80, compares the selected AMD EPYC™ and Intel® Xeon® CPU based server solutions required to deliver a TOTAL_PERFORMANCE of 10,000 units of integer performance based on the published scores for these specific Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC CPU based servers as of January 10, 2023. This estimation reflects a 3-year time frame with a PUE of 1.7 and a power US power cost of $0.16 / kWh. This analysis compares a 2P AMD 64 core AMD EPYC_9554 powered server with a SPECrate2017_int_base score of; to a 2P Intel Xeon 60 core Platinum_8490H based server with a SPECrate2017_int_base score of 991, https://spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2023q1/cpu2017-20221206-33039.pdf.

^iv “Data Center Sustainability,” AMD, https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/corporate-responsibility/data-center-sustainability.html.

^v EPYC-030a: Calculation includes 1) base case kWhr use projections in 2025 conducted with Koomey Analytics based on available research and data that includes segment specific projected 2025 deployment volumes and data center power utilization effectiveness (PUE) including GPU HPC and machine learning (ML) installations and 2) AMD CPU and GPU node power consumptions incorporating segment-specific utilization (active vs. idle) percentages and multiplied by PUE to determine actual total energy use for calculation of the performance per Watt. 13.5x is calculated using the following formula: (base case HPC node kWhr use projection in 2025 * AMD 2023 perf/Watt improvement using DGEMM and TEC +Base case ML node kWhr use projection in 2025 *AMD 2023 perf/Watt improvement using ML math and TEC) /(2020 perf/Watt * Base case projected kWhr usage in 2025). For more information, www.amd.com/en/corporate-responsibility/data-center-sustainability.

^vi AMD Remains the Partner of Choice for World’s Fastest and Most Efficient High Performance Computing Deployments, https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-5-13-amd-remains-the-partner-of-choice-for-world-s-fast.html (accessed May 11, 2024).