AMD, during its 2006 Analyst Day, announced that it wants to be a leader in the push to make data centers more energy efficient. The company's Chairman and CEO, Hector Ruiz, claimed that making servers, desktops and handheld devices more energy efficient is not only good for the environment, but also for business.
Ruiz stated, "We are defining who we want to be. We made energy consumption a key ingredient to what this industry should be all about... We are committed to leading the industry to energy efficiency for everyone from supercomputing down to handheld devices."
Ruiz noted that there is much ground to be gained; for example, for every kilowatt of energy used in a data center, four kilowatts are wasted. This year, AMD founded the Green Grid Initiative, which aims to decrease power consumption while increasing performance. Major players including Dell, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard have joined.
Marty Seyer, a Senior VP of AMD's commercial business, stated that the company's performance per watt numbers are expected to stay strong in the coming year as AMD gets ready to release its native quad-core platform. Seyer said the quad-core should show a 50% performance-per-watt improvement over its own dual-core platform.
AMD's energy efforts are not limited to servers. Seyer stated that the company expects to ship a new version of its Turion 64 mobile chip by early in the second quarter of 2007 at the latest. He said it would also will have an improvement in performance per watt, but declined to give specific details.
"Five years ago, I was asking you to believe in us," Ruiz said to the analysts. "I told you we'd become a serious contender in this space, and we did that I told you we would focus on getting our financials in order and we did that. These accomplishments have emboldened us. We want to become a great, transformational company."
