To be fair to Intel I'm amazed they are still hanging on with 14nm. The question is when they can't rely on clock speed will they be able to compete? It looks highly likely they will lose speed dropping to 10 or 7nm. That will be the real test to see just how good their engineers are.
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AMD Zen 3 (5000 Series), rumored 17% IPC gain.
- Thread starter AStaley
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To be fair to Intel I'm amazed they are still hanging on with 14nm. The question is when they can't rely on clock speed will they be able to compete? It looks highly likely they will lose speed dropping to 10 or 7nm. That will be the real test to see just how good their engineers are.
Soldato
Clock speed doesn't mean much if IPC is improved. That's what Rocket Lake is looking like as it's a 14nm backport of Willow Cove, which has a chunky IPC uplift over Skylake. Yes indeed, clock speeds overall are going to drop as the nodes get smaller but as long as overall performance improves we won't have an issue. Can't recall where I heard it, but it's suggested Rocket Lake will top out at 8 cores, but will still handily outperform the 10 core Comet Lake.
Intel and its fangirls only thump on about 5GHz+ because that's realistically all they have left in the face of Zen 2 and beyond, will be interesting to see how Rocket Lake and on are marketed if 5GHz isn't attainable yet there's a performance deficit to Zen.
Caporegime
This, a 4Ghz CPU is faster than a 5Ghz CPU if the 4Ghz CPU has 30% higher IPC.
Ghz is completely meaningless on its own, a 4.6Ghz Zen 2 is faster than a 5Ghz Coffeelake.
We're pretty much back to the arguments of the p4 era where clockspeed > all in some peoples minds.
Yes that's really what I was getting at. They'll need to find other shatter ways to increase performance, as you mention IPC. I'd much rather have that than power hungry and hot chips, easier to cool for a start.
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I bet there will be some magical new marketing term for increased IPC, as if they've invented it
Plus lists of all the benefits of reduced clock speed 
Soldato
I bet there will be some magical new marketing term for increased IPC, as if they've invented it
Deserves a thread of it's own for name speculation!
Do it!
Soldato
"The groundbreaking 12th Generation Intel Core i9 with 4GHz Super Clock. Because 4 is the new 5"I bet there will be some magical new marketing term for increased IPC, as if they've invented it
Yeah but how often do you see a 4.6Ghz Zen 2? I agree it is theoretically quicker than a 5Ghz Coffee lake but 4.6ghz on Zen 2 seems fleeting and vanishingly rare. IPC is always king though!
Caporegime
High end ones boost to that ST.
I've seen that some do sometimes and some do for quite a bit longer but it seems the exception even ST. I'm not disputing that they can but few seem to do so consistently in a useful way. I'm not knocking them as CPUs as they're really very good but if I believed I could get 4 out of 12 cores (I know you specified ST) on a 3900X running at 4.6ghz with IF at 3600 with good timings without any more than a H110i GT I'd already own a 3900X. It's that little bit of extra clockspeed combined on several threads/cores (not all btw) which would then make it a consistent 9900K beater in gaming.
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Soldato
Anything from 10 to 20% depending on workload, average assumed to be 15%. Combined with another couple hundred MHz on the base clocks we should see a definitive Intel beater until Rocket Lake.17% uplift or go home AMD
Soldato
I see it all the time when running CB 20 in single core mode, in fact 4.65ghz is not uncommon and at the odd time when running it early in the morning when it's very cold have seen 4.7Ghz. The thing is though, i have never posted it because it still dosn't beat Intel.
I already have the best MT score on here, bar sub zero scores. As soon as AMD come up with an ST beater.....................i will post it lol.
Yeah I agree it's possible on one core but as I clarified I need 4 cores at 4.6GHz before I'll bite. Games are going to be more multithreaded very soon and ideally I'd want 8 next Gen Zen cores steaming at 4.6ghz with 10-17% IPC uplift and the other 4 or 8 just doing background stuff. If I'm buying a 5 year frontline CPU I want it to be as quick as or quicker than the quickest when I buy it!
Soldato
Mine hits it on 3 cores. One actually hits 4.65Ghz.
'Hits' but does it keep on hitting for 4 hours? I want to believe I could buy a 3900X/3950X and fire up a CPU demanding game and the 3 or 4 cores running the game's most demanding workload (AI for example) would steam along at 4.6Ghz (I believe Windows scheduler assigns fastest cores to the most demanding tasks these days) making short work of the most CPU demanding tasks of the game and using the best resources available to remove any potential bottlenecks. What I suspect I'd get is one or two threads bouncing up to 4.6Ghz momentarily while doing little or no meaningful work while the other cores/threads would be chugging long at 4.1-4.2ghz. If that is genuinely not what we see now then I'm happy to be corrected but 'boost' speeds that don't exist in any meaningful way do AMD a disservice. A 17% IPC ST uplift would mean clock speed will become a moot point and I really want it to happen but I'd prefer a 17%IPC AND 10% clock speed uplift from Zen 3, its the only way to be sure!
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