Energy saving

Interlagos CPUs support low voltage (1.35V) and ultra low voltage (1.25V) DDR3 for a lower overall system consumption.

Support the C6 power-saving core state, which switches off the clock and power to idle modules, reducing the power dissipation, compared to the previous generation Opteron processors by 46% (the 6174, 12 cores at 2.2GHz, consuming 11.7 W in active idle C1E state, while the 6276, 16 cores at 2.3GHz, consumes 6.4W, C1E in active idle state, with the new C6 power gating state active by BIOS).

TDP Power Cap technology allows you to select the target power of the APM unit with an accuracy of 1 watt.

As seen in the technical article on Bulldozer architecture, the APM module (Advanced Power Management) calculated at each instant the active units, with an accuracy of 2%, hence the upper limit of the power consumed by the CPU at that instant. In this way it can decide whether and for how long the CPU can be in a state of greater Turbo Core, in order to consume the amount of energy as close as possible, but less than the specified limit. In desktop CPUs the limit is usually given from the class (95W or 125W). But with Interlagos CPUs you can force a TDP of less than one for the class (from 35W to 140W) with a granularity of 1 watt, to reduce consumption and heat dissipation, and can, for example, put more racks in a data cabinet with limited dissipation and power. Given how the APM works and the characteristics of the CPU and the software, a given load may even not lose in performance, limiting the power to lower values, for example, if not already fully exploits all the CPU.

Finally, all CPU units, use an advanced clock gating and voltage gating to keep active only the necessary parts of the CPU at that time.

This leads to a consumption per core, up to 56% lower than in INTEL (8-core 35W AMD vs. 6-core 60W Intel). This is possible due to the very low leakage of Global Foundries SOI Process, so that many transistors powered at low voltage and with low clock consume very little.