AMD targets over 7 percent IPC increase for future Zen cores

If you have some time to kill during the holidays, AnandTech has an interview with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster. He reaffirms AMD's commitment to deliver a new Zen series every 12-18 months and stated that AMD plans to go beyond the industry's "slow 7 percent annual growth in single-threaded performance". The current and previous Zen architectures offered a bigger increase in IPC and it's AMD's intention to continue this trend.

MP: So with our roadmap, and as you know I won’t go into specifics about IPC gains for future generations, but we are driving a model of high-performance compute, and there will be performance gains with each new generation. It’s all about picking the right set of IPC improvements, and the right process nodes and design rules for our core designs. There’s always a balance when we design our cores, so match power with efficiency, and at AMD we still expect to exceed the industry standard. We’ve stated before that the industry has been on a slow 7% annual growth rate in single threaded performance, and our goal is to beat that with every generation of our products. We’ve executed better than the industry with our recent products and we exceeded industry expectations.

Interestingly, when asked about a Zen 2+ refresh, Papermaster didn't rule out this idea:

MP: I have nothing to say on any refresh on current designs, but we always look at where it makes sense and where we’re able to take opportunities to provide a bump in performance, power, or die area.