AMD cautions about Zen 2 IPC uplift

Posted on Wednesday, November 14 2018 @ 10:44 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
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A couple of days ago, an article made the rounds about how AMD's Zen 2 design offers an IPC uplift of up to 29 percent. The article was based on some performance figures that were tucked away in a press release about AMD's New Horizon event.

In a rather unusual move, AMD reached out to the press to clarify the footnote, stating it was not intended for general use to calculate a specific IPC uplift claim. The chip designer notes the figures represented the performance improvement in a very select benchmark for financial services workloads. It's not representative for general use. More details about the Zen 2 IPC enhancements will be revealed when the products launch.
"As we demonstrated at our Next Horizon event last week, our next-generation AMD EPYC server processor based on the new ‘Zen 2’ core delivers significant performance improvements as a result of both architectural advances and 7nm process technology. Some news media interpreted a ‘Zen 2’ comment in the press release footnotes to be a specific IPC uplift claim. The data in the footnote represented the performance improvement in a microbenchmark for a specific financial services workload which benefits from both integer and floating point performance improvements and is not intended to quantify the IPC increase a user should expect to see across a wide range of applications. We will provide additional details on ‘Zen 2’ IPC improvements, and more importantly how the combination of our next-generation architecture and advanced 7nm process technology deliver more performance per socket, when the products launch."


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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