Gideon
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2006
- Messages
- 3,523
AMD never stated that Zen wasn't as good as they hoped. Quite the opposite. Their target was a 40% IPC uplift vs. Bulldozer, and they ended up with well over 50% (52% or 54% IIRC). Zen exceeded expectations. Zen+ was just some process tweaks and latency tweaks, combined with a better boosting algorithm. Zen 2 will almost certainly incorporate design tweaks that will grant a little more IPC, but 15% is very doubtful. I'd be happy with 5%. The difference between Zen+ and Skylake in IPC is roughly 9%, excluding heavy AVX workloads. If AMD gets that difference down to a couple percentage points and makes up a little more of the clockspeed deficit, they are right where they should be, provided they are bringing extra cores to the table (which is likely).
https://www.techspot.com/news/70887-amd-ryzen-worst-case-scenario-threadripper-built-engineers.html
While it turned out with good performance they admitted they left stuff to improve in Zen 2. Intel may be left with only 5% gains, but to apply that same restriction to AMD may be a bit foolish since its a brand new architecture.