AMD Focuses on Energy Efficiency

AMD said Tuesday it is working to make its line of processors more energy efficient, basing the new chips on those it has already brought to market. The advances would be most important to notebook users, where power consumption plays a large part in battery life.

Today's AMD chips use as much as 90 watts of power; with the new process, power consumption would be reduced to 35 to 65 watts. The result is a more power efficient and cooler processor, which also allows manufacturers to build smaller form factors.

When chips run cooler, the heat sinks and fans needed to cool the processor do not need to be as large, meaning a manufacturer can use the freed space to add other components, or shrink the size of the overall unit.

To bring about this advance, however, AMD is actually not changing anything. Instead, the company is sorting through the Athlon 64, Sempron and Athlon X2 processors it manufactures, looking for those that consume less electricity. Those that meet the requirements would simply be branded energy-efficient.

Although it may sound strange, this is actually common practice in the industry. Chipmakers will often take chips that perform above their standards and resell them at a higher price. The prices would be roughly $30 to $50 USD more than the standard versions, AMD says.

"AMD has established leadership in both desktop and servers with energy efficiency and performance-per-watt, and we are extremely pleased to once again raise the bar in desktop energy efficiency," the company's corporate vice president of desktops Bob Brewer said in a statement.

The new energy-efficient chips would begin shipping to manufacturers this month, appearing in the first commercially available computers later in the year.