How AMD Is Helping Customers Save Energy and Advance Their Sustainability Goals

Every April 22nd, we celebrate Earth Day, and people from around the globe come together to advance sustainability and climate action. As a leader in the semiconductor industry, AMD has a role to play in mitigating climate change – not only by making our products more energy efficient, but also by powering the research needed to transition to a low-carbon economy.

Maximizing the computing performance delivered per watt of energy consumed is a vital aspect of our business strategy. Our products’ cutting-edge chip architecture, design and power management features have resulted in significant generational energy efficiency gains, and we have the track record to prove it.

In the data center, AMD EPYC™ processors power the most energy-efficient x86 servers, delivering exceptional performance and helping reduce energy costs.^[i] AMD EPYC technology can drive energy efficiencies by meeting application performance demands with fewer physical servers than competitive solutions, which can result in a reduced data center footprint and associated energy use and GHG emissions. For example, to deliver 2,000 virtual machines, it takes an estimated 11 2P AMD EPYC™ 9654-powered servers or 17 2P Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8490H-based servers. The AMD solution takes an estimated 35 percent fewer servers, uses approximately 29 percent less power and provides estimated GHG emission savings equivalent to the carbon sequestration of 38 acres of forest in the United States.^[ii]

Energy efficiency is paramount when it comes to supercomputing, which is the concentration of processing power across multiple parallel computers. AMD powers 75 percent of the top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers, according to the Green500 List, published in November 2022, and we received a 2022 SEAL Sustainable Product Award for our 30x25 Energy Efficiency Goal for Accelerated Computing initiative, driving innovative and impactful products “purpose-built” for a sustainable future in data centers.

Our continued ambitions are reflected in this AMD goal of a 30x increase by 2025 in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators powering servers for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence-training. We are on track toward achieving our goal as of 2022, having reached 6.8x improvement in energy efficiency compared to 2020 using an accelerated compute node powered by one 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC CPU and four AMD Instinct MI250x GPUs.^[iii]

One of the most rewarding aspects of my work with our customers and partners is seeing AMD computing solutions that advance technology needs and sustainability objectives. For example, the LUMI supercomputer, powered by optimized 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Instinct™ MI250X GPUs (A+A), is helping scientists better understand and model climate change and its impacts, while running on 100 percent renewable energy and repurposing waste heat for a nearby town.

In addition to LUMI’s environmental operating benefits, it is being put to work on some of the world’s most urgent climate-related problems. As part of the European Green Deal and European Digital Strategy, the supercomputer is being used in the Destination Earth project (DestinE), which is funded by the EU’s Digital Europe Programme. The project focuses on climate modeling: the aim is to create a detailed model of Earth – a digital twin of our planet – that can be used to understand climate change and its impacts, including extreme weather phenomena such as floods and hurricanes. With LUMI, researchers can link the climate model to other models to understand the complex interplay between environmental processes and systems.

For Earth Day this year, I encourage you to engage with others across our value chain and share how AMD is striving to empower companies around the world to advance sustainability goals – we can do far more from collective efforts than as individuals. 

For more information, please visit: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate-responsibility/environmental-sustainability

^Footnotes:

^{[i] EPYC-028B: EPYC-028B: SPECpower_ssj® 2008, SPECrate®2017_int_energy_base, and SPECrate®2017_fp_energy_base based on results published on SPEC’s website as of 11/10/22. VMmark® server power-performance (PPKW) based results published at https://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results3x.1.html?sort=score. The first 74 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 4 of 5 SPECrate®2017_int_energy_base performance/system W scores. For SPECrate®2017 Floating Point (Energy Base), AMD EPYC CPUs power the first 8 of 9 SPECrate®2017_fp_energy_base performance/system W scores. For VMmark® server power-performance (PPKW), have the top two results for 2- and 4-socket matched pair results outperforming all other socket results. See https://www.amd.com/en/claims/epyc3x#faq-EPYC-028B for the full list. 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.}

^{[ii] SP5TCO-036: As of 01/18/2023 based on AMD Internal analysis using the AMD EPYC™ Server Virtualization & Greenhouse Gas Emission TCO Estimation Tool - version 12.10 estimating the cost and quantity of 2P AMD 96 core EPYC™ 9654 powered server versus 2P Intel® Xeon® 60 core Platinum 8490H based server solutions required to deliver 2000 total virtual machines (VM), requiring 1 core and 8GB of memory per VM for a 3-year period. This includes VMware software license cost of $6,558.32 per socket + one additional software for every 32 CPU core increment in that socket. Environmental impact estimates made leveraging this data, using the Country / Region specific electricity factors from the '2020 Grid Electricity Emissions Factors v1.4 – September 2020', and the United States Environmental Protection Agency 'Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator'. 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. For additional details, see https://www.amd.com/en/claims/epyc4#SP5TCO-036.} 

^{[iii] EPYC-030: 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 socket 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. 6.79x = (base case HPC node kWhr use projection in 2025 x AMD 2022 perf/Watt improvement using DGEMM and typical energy consumption + Base case ML node kWhr use projection in 2025 *AMD 2022 perf/Watt improvement using ML math and typical energy consumption) /(2020 perf/Watt * Base case projected kWhr usage in 2025). For more information on the goal and methodology, visit https://www.amd.com/en/corporate-responsibility/data-center-sustainability.}