AMD has announced a goal to deliver a 30x increase in energy efficiency for AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPU accelerators used in artificial intelligence (AI) training and high-performance computing (HPC) applications by 2025. Achieving this 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.
“Looking at current and projected computing demands, the AMD team decided that it would be most meaningful to focus on the component that constitutes the fastest-growing segments in data centre consumption, accelerated computing,” Sam Naffziger, SVP of AMD, said. “To achieve this goal, AMD engineers will prioritise driving major efficiency gains in accelerated compute nodes through architecture, silicon design, software and packaging innovations while publicly benchmarking our progress annually.”
The increased energy efficiency for accelerated computing applications is part of the company’s new goals in environmental, social, governance (ESG) across operations, supply chain and products. In addition, to compute node performance/watt measurements the company uses segment-specific data centre power utilisation effectiveness (PUE) with equipment utilisation taken into account. The energy consumption baseline uses the same industry energy per operation improvement rates as from 2015-2020, extrapolated to 2025. The measure of energy per operation improvement in each segment from 2020-2025 is weighted by the projected worldwide volumes multiplied by the Typical Energy Consumption (TEC) of each computing segment to arrive at a meaningful metric of actual energy usage improvement worldwide.
“Achieving gains in processor energy efficiency is a long-term design priority for AMD and we are now setting a new goal for modern compute nodes using our high-performance CPUs and accelerators when applied to AI training and high-performance computing deployments,” Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and CTO of AMD, said. “Focused on these very important segments and the value proposition for leading companies to enhance their environmental stewardship, AMD’s 30x goal outpaces industry energy efficiency performance in these areas by 150 per cent compared to the previous five-year time period.”
