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."