AMD ZeroCore Power

Recent generations of high-end graphics cards accept faced issues with ability consumption. For example, when outfitted with a GTX 480, our exam system's consumption hitting 407 watts nether load and nearly 200 watts at idle. Past comparison, the HD 5870 drank 25% less with 150 watts at idle. It's worth mentioning that these figures remain unchanged whether your display is awake or not (until now, anyway).

While the display is using significantly less power if it'due south sleeping, your graphics card is still drawing the same amount as it does in our desktop idle test, which leaves the brandish on while the PC is idle. AMD and Nvidia graphics cards take employed numerous ability saving methods to reduce idle consumption. Such techniques include clock gating, power gating, retentiveness compression and a few others.

Even so, because the GPU remains agile, it withal requires quite a bit of ability. The 55nm HD 4870 used 90 watts at idle, the 40nm HD 5870 reduced that to 27 watts and so the Hard disk 6970 whittled that to 24 watts. The Hard disk drive 7970 is a game changer in this sense, consuming only 3 watts courtesy of AMD'south sectional ZeroCore Power technology, which essentially powers off the GPU while the system is active.

When the display goes off, the GPU ordinarily can't power off because the operating system and BIOS must remain aware of its presence. The ZeroCore Power country maintains a very small bus control block to ensure that GPU context is still visible to the OS and BIOS. It as well manages the GPU'due south power sequencing to ensure the power up/down mechanism is independent of the remainder of the arrangement.

ZeroCore Power monitors the display content and forces the GPU into its power-sipping state when the engine is no longer receiving work requests. If any applications update the screen content, ZeroCore Power tin can periodically wake the GPU to update the frame buffer content and and then put the chip dorsum to slumber. This could place AMD's latest cards in a league of their ain in terms of power efficiency.