However the big story with Southern Islands for idle power consumption isn’t regular idle, rather it’s “long idle.” Long idle is AMD’s term for any scenarios where the GPU can go completely idle, that is where it doesn’t need to do any work at all. For desktop computers this would primarily be for when the display is put to sleep, as the GPU does not need to do at work when the display itself can’t show anything.

Currently video cards based on AMD’s GPUs can cut their long idle power consumption by a couple of watts by turning off any display transmitters and their clock sources, but the rest of the GPU needs to be minimally powered up. This is what AMD seeks to change.

With Southern Islands AMD is introducing ZeroCore Power, their long idle power saving technology. By implementing power islands on their GPUs AMD can now outright shut off most of the functional units of a GPU when the GPU is going unused, leaving only the PCIe bus interface and a couple other components active. By doing this AMD is able to reduce their power consumption from 15W at idle to under 3W in long idle, a power level low enough that in a desktop the power consumption of the video card becomes trivial. So trivial in fact that with under 3W of heat generation AMD doesn’t even need to run the fan – ZeroCore Power shuts off the fan as it’s rendered an unnecessary device that’s consuming power.

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bazman25 said:

hi i have just got the Powercolor HD 7950 PCS+ and i would like to know how AMD zerocore works? i have left my card on idle for about 20mins with the monitor off but havnt noticed it going into zerocore mode Are the fans on GPU supposed to stop running while in zerocore mode?

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