Whatever happens next, the new normal is officially hybrid. This shift in how we work is also impacting how businesses choose technology. Portability, once merely a “nice to have,” is now essential. And, as users move between the office, home, and everywhere in-between, battery life matters more than ever. Maximum power efficiency ensures users can enjoy long battery life to stay connected, keep creating, and continue collaborating for longer before looking for a place to plug in.
These big changes are driven by more than just the need for mobility, but also because the kinds of tools and applications we depend on have evolved. Businesses have seen Zoom and other video communications tools go from being occasionally used to absolutely essential, and this has raised performance needs and expectations.
Whether it’s the nearly overnight shift to video conferencing as a default, or the need to keep up with modern multitasking usage scenarios, organizations now realize that real futureproofing means building in sufficient headroom to tackle what comes tomorrow. Being ready for the next disruption – whether a new compute need, or an emerging use case – means laptop performance and battery life must be ready to keep up with our new hybrid normal.
Expectations for experiences are up
The demand for improved productivity is only part of the challenge. Users also have rising expectations and believe that every upgrade should bring greater performance and longer battery life. Power-hungry components such as OLED displays, backlit keyboards, and CPU-intensive applications are all making big demands on battery life, even as users want devices that go further and last longer.
Meanwhile, devices are getting thinner and lighter, and require extraordinary engineering to deliver on – sometimes competing – performance and battery life goals. Depending on the scenario, a user may prefer to maximize battery life on a long flight or plug in at home and crunch numbers. In either case, they expect seamless productivity and control.
All this change puts the pressure on manufacturers like AMD to deliver smarter, more robust productivity and battery life generation after generation, maximizing known optimizations while also looking for new opportunities to improve performance-per-watt. This is critical to the performance- and experience-driven expectations that emerge from a dynamically changing work environment.
Innovation for battery life
Fortunately, AMD has always been focused on solving exactly these kinds of critical performance challenges. The company brings innovative design to ambitious performance and battery efficiency goals, building these objectives into every new generation of products, including the new AMD Ryzen™ PRO 5000 Series mobile processors. The results include platforms that provide high performance with a high-efficiency solution designed to keep up with elevated expectations and give customers solutions designed for any usage scenario.
Boosting performance-per-watt requires new approaches in both process and power management design. AMD Ryzen™ 5000 PRO Series mobile processors deliver big gains in both these areas through a careful focus on more advanced fabrication process technology, more aggressive power gating and power management, and more efficient overall system power. Some of these improvements are directly enabled by AMD’s move to 7nm, which inherently lowers processor power consumption and improves battery life compared to larger process nodes.
Additionally, the “Zen 3” architecture enables the chip to turn off processor functions not needed by the current workload, lowering overall power consumption without impacting the user experience.
These and other innovations have allowed AMD to achieve substantial generational improvement in how the platform delivers power to the processor and other components. These design gains can reduce the overall system power loss, which can be significant.
Maximized responsiveness and choice
AMD knows that when users evaluate laptop PC productivity, they want a snappy overall experience regardless of the task. Whether a user is choosing to maximize battery life or performance, they expect seamless, disruption-free performance, plugged in or not. AMD optimizes for best-in-class battery life that still feels crisp and responsive across all OS power slider settings, from “battery saver” to “best performance.” No matter how an end-user actually uses their system, AMD Ryzen™ 5000 PRO Series mobile processors help them to stay in control without negatively impacting the performance experience.
Optimized for today’s diverse usage scenarios
Since no two workloads are exactly alike, it can be challenging to define the performance requirements for the new hybrid workplace. This is why AMD engineers design and deliver for a broad mix of varying tasks and scenarios. This more user-centric approach to performance ensures we can maintain both higher performance and better battery life across a diverse mix of modern use cases.
Our view on benchmarking is the same: meaningful testing must come from workloads configured around real-world priorities and constraints. Many scenarios are covered in AMD battery life testing, from creativity apps and web browsing to video playback and office productivity. This blended approach to designing and measuring performance enables the AMD Ryzen™ 5000 PRO Series mobile processors to deliver the balanced performance, battery life, and responsiveness that businesses need to enable real-world hybrid productivity.
As noted by Peter Chambers, Managing Director, Sales, AMD Asia Pacific & Japan, “Hardware needs in today’s workforce are very diverse with professionals rightfully demanding hardware that is lightweight and sleek to enable mobility, with impressive performance and long battery life to support demanding tasks while at home or on-the-go. In addition to engineering leading edge products such as the AMD Ryzen™ PRO 5000 Series mobile processors, AMD collaborates closely with our partners who share a similar passion for technology and innovation, enabling us to build no-compromise solutions optimised for today’s workforce needs.”
Changing the world through compute
Thinking and building bigger has been part of our DNA from the start. That’s why, as the world of work evolves, AMD engineers are already building for this future.
It’s why we were able to keep our 25×20 promise, bringing an integrated mobile processor to market with at least 25 times more energy efficiency by the year 2020 compared to 2014 standards. This innovation alone could reduce an organization’s PC energy consumption by up to 84%[1], and even more meaningful gains are possible when battery life is factored in.
Building for a new baseline
When it comes to the technology fundamentals critical to new ways of collaborating and creating value, an accelerated pace of change has left many businesses racing to close the gaps between expectations and experience. This starts with rethinking device selection, looking beyond outdated user profiles and a false choice between maximum power or smarter battery life; the hybrid workplace demands both.
Technology constraints like these have always driven AMD engineers to excel, using smarter processes and better design and development approaches to continuously push the limits on battery efficiency with each new Ryzen Generation. And it’s this established record of battery life leadership, in turn, that’s helping inspire device makers to deliver a better class of PC experience whether plugged in, working free, or anywhere in between.
