ATI PowerPlay
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AMD PowerPlay is the brand name for a set of technologies for the reduction of the energy consumption implemented in several of
AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...
's
graphics processing units A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal co ...
and
APUs Apus is a small constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere, southern sky. It represents a bird-of-paradise, and its name means "without feet" in Greek language, Greek because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. ...
supported by their proprietary graphics device driver "Catalyst". AMD PowerPlay is also implemented into ATI/AMD chipsets which integrated graphics and into AMD's Imageon handheld chipset, that was sold to
Qualcomm Qualcomm Incorporated () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless techn ...
in 2008. Besides the desirable goal to reduce energy consumption, AMD PowerPlay helps to lower the noise levels created by the cooling in desktop computers and extend battery life in mobile devices. AMD PowerPlay has been succeeded by AMD PowerTune.


History

The technology was first implemented in Mobility Radeon products for notebooks, to provide a set of features to lower the power consumption of the laptop computer. The technology consists of several technologies; examples include dynamic clock adjustments when the notebook is not plugged into a power socket and allowing different backlight brightness levels of the notebook
LCD A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers to display information. Liquid crystals do not em ...
monitor. The technology was updated with the release of each generation of mobile GPUs. The latest release is ATI PowerPlay 7.0. Since the release of Radeon HD 3000 Series, PowerPlay was implemented to further reduce the power consumption of desktop GPUs.


Currently supported products

The official ATI support list lists only the ATI Radeon 3800 series desktop cards, but PowerPlay is also a listed feature of all Radeon HD 3000/4000/5000 series products. Independent reviews indicated that the latter was already lower power compared to other 3D cards, so the addition of PowerPlay to that line was clearly intended to address an increasingly power, heat and noise conscious market. The ATI Radeon HD 2600 line – which does not support PowerPlay – was being phased out in favour of the 3000 series at the same price points that also support
PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...
2.0,
DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...
10.1 and faster GDDR3 memory. The entire ATI Radeon Xpress line is also supported for single board computers which tend to be power sensitive and used in large installations where configuration and boot image control are major concerns. Support for "PowerPlay" was added to the Linux kernel driver "amdgpu" on November 11, 2015.


Desktop versus laptop

The main difference between the desktop and laptop versions is that the desktop version cuts the features which are aimed at notebook usage, including variable LCD backlight brightness. The PowerPlay technology for Radeon desktop graphics features three usage scenarios: normal mode (2D mode), light gaming mode and intensive gaming mode (3D mode), replacing notebook scenarios (running on AC power or battery power). Tests indicated that the lowest core clock frequency of an RV670 GPU core can reach as low as 300
MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), often described as being equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose formal expression in terms of SI base u ...
with PowerPlay technology enabled.PC Watch image
Retrieved December 3, 2007. Notice the core speed in current clock settings section in gray.


Feature overview for AMD APUs


Feature overview for AMD graphics cards


See also

*
Cool'n'Quiet AMD Cool'n'Quiet is a CPU dynamic frequency scaling and power saving technology introduced by AMD with its Athlon XP processor line. It works by reducing the processor's clock rate and voltage when the processor is idle. The aim of this techn ...
& PowerNow! – power-saving technologies for CPUs * AMD PowerXpress - power-saving technologies for multi-GPUs


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:PowerPlay AMD products AMD technologies AMD software Graphics processing units Year of introduction missing