AMD today announced its AMD E-350 APU demonstrated a significant reduction in the overall product "carbon footprint" as compared to a previous generation product featuring an AMD Athlon Neo II Dual core processor and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5430 graphics processor.

The environmental benefits were evidenced by a recently completed carbon footprint study that examined the production and use of the new APU, and found a reduction of up to 40 percent in total carbon emissions over the life of the APU.

The study calculated the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, or carbon footprint, of the systems from the silicon fabrication through the use phases of the product life cycle. The findings showed that the AMD Fusion APU reference system generated 40.2kg CO2e of GHG emissions compared to 67.4kg CO2e of GHG emissions for the previous generation products ? a 40.3% reduction in overall GHG emissions associated with the APU product over its estimated lifetime. While the study showed some reduction in carbon footprint at the manufacturing stage, the largest carbon benefits for the APU stem from lower energy consumption when the product is used.

The lower carbon footprint of the AMD E-350 APU, as compared to the test system, results from the integration of the computing and graphics processors onto a single piece of silicon. This eliminates the chip-to-chip linkage between CPU and GPU that can add latency to memory operations and reduce power.

The study compared systems with the following specifications: the AMD Fusion APU system featured the AMD E-350 APU (18 watts Thermal Design Power), which is a single-chip processor that combines a dual-core CPU with a DirectX11 discrete-class graphics processing unit (GPU); while the reference system featured a dual-core AMD Athlon Neo II CPU and a discrete ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5430 GPU card.

The potential carbon footprint savings from AMD Fusion APU technology is dramatic. The AMD Fusion APU tested in the Carbon Footprint Study was found to save an estimated 27.2 kgCO2e over its lifetime compared to the non-APU product. As to the product use, which was by far the greatest source of carbon emissions, the study found that a single AMD Fusion APU-based system could save an estimated 9 KWh of energy/year.

Updated Software Development Kit

AMD also today announced availability of the updated AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Software Development Kit (SDK) v2.3 with full support for the first AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), OpenCL 1.1 and AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series graphics. AMD APP technology enables AMD GPUs and CPUs to work together to run many demanding computing tasks faster than possible with just the CPU alone.

AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing SDK v2.3, previously known as the ATI Stream SDK, empowers software developers to write new applications that can take full advantage of the parallel processing power of heterogeneous computing platforms, such as those based on new AMD E-Series and C-Series APUs that combine a multi-core CPU and DirectX 11-capable GPU on a single die.

In addition to support for the first AMD Fusion APUs and OpenCL 1.1, AMD APP SDK v2.3 offers improved runtime performance and math libraries for OpenCL.

Improving OpenCL performance and programmability on AMD platforms is a key initiative for AMD, and this summer, AMD technical personnel, AMD executives, developers and partner companies will gather at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit to discuss industry standards including OpenCL, and to explore how to best optimize applications for heterogeneous computing.

The inaugural AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) will be held June 13-16, 2011 in Bellevue, Washington.