Amd clarifies zen 2 reporting and 29% improvement in ipc

A few days ago, AMD commented that the new Zen 2 architecture was going to represent a 29% IPC performance improvement, something that has excited many users who are betting on AMD. Now, AMD has come out to clarify this matter, lowering the decibels a bit.

AMD Clarifies That Zen 2 IPC Improvement Depends On Workload

In a recent statement, AMD clarified that the CPI 29.4% performance increase report is based on a 'specific workload' and that this value should not be used to establish expectations of overall performance improvements by watch with the new Zen 2 processors. As always, you can't use a single benchmark to define a complete product.

The IPC stands for 'Instructions Per Clock', the number of instructions that can be processed by a CPU in any clock cycle. A processor with a higher IPC than another will offer higher levels of performance than a CPU with a lower IPC with the same clock speed, although it is always worth bearing in mind that the IPC itself depends on the workload.

The 29.4% increase in IPC on Zen 2 processors is based on both integer and floating point workloads, using the doubling of floating point performance reported by Zen 2 to get great effect during its testing. It stands to reason that a workload that relies almost entirely on floating point performance will experience greater performance increases, or IPC elevations, in that scenario, and that entire tasks will experience less performance increases.

Therefore, in the overall performance of Zen 2, the improvement in the IPC may not go up to those values ​​that were originally published. We will keep you informed.

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