Power efficiency is a critical performance metric for our discrete graphics products.  This should come as no surprise for those who follow the overall industry trends: Consumers are more aware of the impact their product choices make on the environment; products in the industry are moving toward thinner and lighter form factors; and rising energy costs can significantly impact the cost of ownership of new PC products.  The net result is that consumers  value energy efficient products across the board.

Someone with a more traditional view of the enthusiast graphics market might think that the highest end graphics products are isolated or exempt from these trends and driven only by the need for higher peak performance.  In reality, this is certainly not the case.  At AMD, our focus on power efficiency via thin-and-light capable products designed to run on battery power has actually helped result in more power efficient products across the stack; particularly in our enthusiast products which have enjoyed major performance improvements alongside major efficiency improvements.

In recent years, AMD has proven itself to be a leader in power efficiency with the introduction of technologies such as PowerPlay™  and AMD PowerTune technologies¹.  These features  are fast becoming must-haves because of how strongly end users value power efficiency.

Most recently, AMD has further demonstrated its leadership in this field with the introduction of the AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 series graphics cards which feature a new bleeding edge and revolutionary capability known as AMD ZeroCore Power Technology¹.   AMD ZeroCore  Power technology is a game changer which cuts long idle power down to a small fraction of what was previously achievable; which is something we know that our enthusiast audience will truly appreciate.

So how does it work?

When GPUs aren’t tasked with heavy graphics or compute workloads, they are intelligently managed to power down to their minimum working states through a number of techniques such as engine/memory clock reductions, reduced voltages and power gating.   This works to minimize power during static screen and other very low workloads where graphics cards can idle at less than  their peak power.

However, in the long idle state – where the display is blanked but the rest of the system remains in an active power state – AMD ZeroCore Power technology takes GPU efficiency to a whole new level.  When systems enter the long idle state and applications are not using background GPU resources, AMD ZeroCore power technology  powers down all major functional blocks of the discrete GPU and reduces overall chip power consumption to well under one Watt.  And while core GPU blocks (such as the compute units, display blocks, video engines and memory interfaces) are  shut down and consuming zero power, the rest of the system is still available to do what it needs to do.  So if you leave your PC on to share/stream/serve content, to simplify remote access or to simply make sure it’s ready to go at the flick of a mouse, AMD ZeroCore Power technology makes it happen with near-zero graphics power.

For the ultra-enthusiast, AMD ZeroCore Power technology takes things a step further to enable scalable power savings:  With AMD CrossFire™ technology, the additional GPUs are always held in the AMD ZeroCore Power state when they’re not in use.  This means that AMD CrossFire™ users can scale up their performance with negligible idle power increases and no acoustic penalties.

As you can see, ZeroCore Power is a huge leap forward for AMD in delivering low power and high efficiency graphics. And given it took us less than one year to morph this innovation from a notebook GPU hardware capability to a groundbreaking capability for the desktop AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 series, it’s innovation we can all get excited about!

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1. AMD PowerPlay™, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power are technologies offered by certain AMD Radeon™ products, which are designed to intelligently manage GPU power consumption in response to certain GPU load conditions. Not all products feature all technologies – check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities.

Korhan Erenben is the Manager of Technical Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

For more details read below:

AMD Eyefinity technology enhancements

• Enables support for AMD Eyefinity 5×1 display (portrait and landscape) configurations
• Maximum supported resolution has been increased to 16000 x 16000 pixels on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 Series. (limited to DirectX^® 11 applications only)
• Bezel compensation is now possible when using sets of displays that have mismatched pixel densities

AMD Catalyst Control Center™ enhancements

• Improvements have been implemented to better facilitate the enabling and control of the following features within the AMD Catalyst Control Center™
  • AMD Overdrive technology for GPUs
  • Information Center (software and hardware)

Performance Highlights

• Improves performance in Battlefield 3 for both non-Anti-Aliasing, and application enabled Anti-Aliasing cases on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series graphics cards for single GPU configurations
• Improves performance in Battlefield 3 for both non-Anti-Aliasing, and application enabled Anti-Aliasing cases on AMD CrossFireX™ technology configurations using the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series
• Improves performance in Rage on single GPU configurations using the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000, AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series and AMD Radeon™ HD 4000 Series

AMD Catalyst™ 11.10 Linux driver

This release of AMD Catalyst™ driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:

• RHEL 5.7 production support
• Ubuntu 11.10 early look support

You can download the latest drivers here.

David Doel is on the AMD Gaming Marketing team. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.