AMD ’ s Commitment to Accelerating Energy Efficiency

The remarkable performance advances in computing since the birth of the modern microprocessor can be largely attributed to Moore’s Law—the doubling of the number of transistors on a chip about every two years as manufacturing technology advances allow for smaller and smaller transistors. Less well known is that this exponential rise in available processing power has been accompanied by corresponding improvements in energy efficiency and processor speed. A study in 2010 found that the amount of computation that could be done per unit of energy doubled about every 18 months, an observation known as Koomey’s Law.1