The study results are based on the widely accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol established by the World Resources Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable Development and were announced today during an AMD sponsored media panel on energy efficient information technology.

Mark Papermaster, AMD's senior vice president and chief technology officer said that creating low-power, energy efficient products is a key element of AMD's business strategy.

"We are working alongside our customers to reduce the environmental footprint of technology while relentlessly improving performance," he said,

An enterprise customer upgrading from 100,000 PCs using the previous generation AMD processor to the 6th Generation AMD A-Series APU could save an estimated 4.9 million kilowatt hours of electricity – or roughly $495,000 – and 3,350 metric tons of CO2 (equal to powering 461 homes) over a 3-year product service life.

In 2014, AMD announced an ambitious goal of improving the typical use energy efficiency of its mobile APUs by 25 times by 2020, from a 2014 baseline.

Meeting the 25x20 target requires increasing the pace of efficiency gains by using new power management features and innovative designs. The energy efficiency improvements needed to achieve this goal outpace the historical efficiency trend predicted by Moore's Law by at least 70 percent, he said.

That means that in 2020 a computer could accomplish a task in one-fifth the time of a personal computer in 2014 while consuming on average less than one fifth the power.

Using a car analogy, this rate of improvement would be like turning a 100-horsepower car that gets 30 miles per gallon into a 500-horsepower car that gets 150 miles per gallon in only six years, Papermaster added.