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AMD Zen 2 Offers a 13% IPC Gain over Zen+, 16% over Zen 1

"scientific tasks" is the most vague thing I have ever heard in my life. In terms of CPU instructions that could be literally anything. What is it that a CPU does that isn't a "scientific task"? Painting a work of art? cutting the grass?
 
Colleagues of mine were at a Dell EMC event last week at Shepperton Studios hosted by SNS and there was a lot of pushing EPYC products from DELL.. ive not yet noticed on the Dell Premier Portal much in the way of Ryzen in Business Clients yet though... been keeping my eyes peeled... However my Boss has said a few days ago, our Central IT (I work for a worldwide FTSE 500 Manufacturing company) has started pushing why arent we looking at AMD / Zen / EPYC etc.. so i can imagine before long we will see a shift.. Money men make the decisions after all.

Yes and this is the thing. Whilst to get best performance you need better RAM for Ryzen, its still got great productivity performance with boggo ram, and the motherboards and CPUs are both SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper. This will appeal to the money men that is for sure; especially if the Intel situation gets worse.

Throw on the whole AM4 motherboard/multiple CPU generations thing and it only gets easier to justify, as with Intel - new gen/more performance = new motherboard, thats a cost thats not necessarily needed now with AMD, which again appeals to the money men, as the same basic machine can be given a midlife refresh in a few years for increased performance, without requiring budget for a full refresh (aka replacement).
I mean, right now you can buy a cheap B350, upgrade the firmware and stick a 1***, 2**** and will purportedly also be able to put 3***, 4*** etc chips in, all from the same board (even if not unleashing the full capabilities of the newer chips), and B4** motherboards will take again, gen 1/2 and supposedly the next few gens, so again, much more flexibility...and generally, flexibility of motherboard and CPU means you can chose the most cost effective option.

You just can't do that with Intel; you have to buy the right gen motherboard to go with right gen CPU.
 
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"scientific tasks" is the most vague thing I have ever heard in my life. In terms of CPU instructions that could be literally anything. What is it that a CPU does that isn't a "scientific task"? Painting a work of art? cutting the grass?

It is very, very vague, but I suspect it means averaged value for number crunching/compute; games are very different beasties.
 
13% seems really low gains for a move from "12nm" to a 7nm node.

About 6 years worth of Intel generations... Not sure how you correlate process to IPC.

A 13% gain with even a minimal boost in clockspeed will result in a significant performance uplift and put AMD a long way in front of Intel.
 
About 6 years worth of Intel generations... Not sure how you correlate process to IPC.

A 13% gain with even a minimal boost in clockspeed will result in a significant performance uplift and put AMD a long way in front of Intel.

Word on the street though is that minimal boosts in clock speed are about all it will manage over current Ryzen CPUs. I suppose if we get a 3700x @ 4.5ghz it will do well enough.
 
13% average IPC boost, and 10% clock boost on top would be more than enough to make it noticeably faster than current Ryzen chips. I'm not expecting anything crazy, but say 200-400Mhz speed boost, and the rumoured IPC...it'd do quite well!

Saw one place quoting an early ES doing 4GHZ base, 4.5GHz boost already, and final versions are usually a little faster. If they really do boost IPC by 10-15%, and then go up to about 4.5GHz, it'd probably be enough :)

I mean, clock for clock, Zen and Intels current chips are pretty close now with Ryzen typically losing due to the clock speed deficit, so throw 10% additional IPC on top, and then boost it to 4.5GHz, and thats roughly equivalent to an Intel at 5GHz pretty handily, assuming 4.4-4.6GHz is achievable, I've no reason to think this won't be right up there, and substantially cheaper in all likelihood also.
 
Word on the street though is that minimal boosts in clock speed are about all it will manage over current Ryzen CPUs. I suppose if we get a 3700x @ 4.5ghz it will do well enough.

Ryzen at 4.5Ghz with 10-15% gain from architectural improvements and on a 7nm process will do a lot more than well.
 
About 6 years worth of Intel generations... Not sure how you correlate process to IPC.

A 13% gain with even a minimal boost in clockspeed will result in a significant performance uplift and put AMD a long way in front of Intel.

Intel has really not been trying though - really shouldn't be advocating pace at their rate. The difference between TSMC's 7nm which by all reports is shaping up decently and the 12nm process Ryzen CPUs are currently on is vast - more than the jump from Intel's 22nm to 14nm+++++++++ or whatever variant it is now. Which should give huge scope for pipeline efficiency especially in terms of reduced latency which would help with prediction misses, etc.
 
Intel has really not been trying though - really shouldn't be advocating pace at their rate. The difference between TSMC's 7nm which by all reports is shaping up decently and the 12nm process Ryzen CPUs are currently on is vast - more than the jump from Intel's 22nm to 14nm+++++++++ or whatever variant it is now. Which should give huge scope for pipeline efficiency especially in terms of reduced latency which would help with prediction misses, etc.

Intel is trying very hard. You can't compare nodes from different firms. TSMC is focused on mobile CPU production (for some time) obviously AMD will influence have huge a influence at TSMC but that remains to be seen. You don't need a new process to improve your chip design. It literally has no relevance to this topic.
 
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Intel is trying very hard. You can't compare nodes from different firms. TSMC is focused on a mobile CPU production for some time, obviously AMD will influence have huge a influence at TSMC but that remains to be seen. You don't need a new process to improve your chip design. It literally has no relevance to this topic.

Pretty much everything you said other than the bit in bold is wrong.
 
That 13% IPC gain would be very impressive. It's only 2% less than the IPC difference of 4790K to 9900K...

However Zen is an immature architecture so IPC should be able to be found. If they can match that with some nice Frequency boosts Zen 2 will be a pretty beastly processor.
 
If you start from a lower base it's easier to make bigger % improvements.
Of course. Except it's not really much of a lower base. 154 pts vs 146 pts isn't a huge difference in IPC in 3.5GHz normalised Cinebench testing. So a 13% increase (best case scenario) would be 165pts for Zen 2. That's 11 points higher than Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake. With 4.6GHz on the clock it's faster than equivalent Intel at 5.1GHz and the same core counts....
 
With 4.6GHz on the clock it's faster than equivalent Intel at 5.1GHz and the same core counts....

Quite.

I think a 3700x will have the 9900x licked. I'm personally interested to see what 3rd gen ThreadRipper can do.
 
It's both.

For example, I try really hard to improve at Rocket League, however I've improved little.

Doesn't fit this context his second quote says they've done very little - which is what I was saying - without much competition over the last 10 years they've not particularly pushed themselves to wring out IPC gains so not really much of a metric for what good progress should look like. They might be trying now but that is irrelevant.
 
Doesn't fit this context his second quote says they've done very little - which is what I was saying - without much competition over the last 10 years they've not particularly pushed themselves to wring out IPC gains so not really much of a metric for what good progress should look like. They might be trying now but that is irrelevant.

I think they've been trying hard in the past, but have been unsuccessful. I don't buy the "no competition" in regards of performance. No competition results in increased price, not lack of performance.
 
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