AMD Releases Statement on Zen 2 IPC Performance Uplift Article

cageymaru

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AMD has released a statement explaining the Zen 2 IPC performance uplift numbers noted in press release footnotes. According to AMD, "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." The full statement is below.

"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."
 
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Always take benchmarks with a grain of salt but yea, they were pretty clear in what their benchmarks were running so I am not upset. I am looking forward to seeing how well it works with the Adobe & Auto Desk suites as well as a number of 3D rendering suites when paired with the appropriate graphics cards, I have a Citrix server I need to replace around Q3 of 2019.
 
Since Lisa Su took over there has been a definite shift in their marketing to be more open and honest about performance.

Also their conservative numbers not hyping up their products with crazy numbers, community does that nicely by themselves :)

Edit:

We have the people working on the products on the stage and not some business guy or marketing guy.
it's starting to become a while since I saw marketing guys take the stage at AMD now which may be why everything in marketing is better ? :)
 
Well people jumping to all kinds of conclusions way to soon about announcements ...
 
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Still buying Zen 2 no matter what.


Awfully bold statement regarding a future product we know very little about.

I mean, I'm looking forward to seeing what it will bring, but "will buy undisclosed product no matter what" seems kind of moronic.
 
Awfully bold statement regarding a future product we know very little about.

I mean, I'm looking forward to seeing what it will bring, but "will buy undisclosed product no matter what" seems kind of moronic.

here i'll join him as well.. i'm buying zen 2 no matter what.. why? because why the hell not, the odds of it be worse than my r5 1600 are pretty slim and hell if i'm going to buy a new motherboard to switch to intel.. :p
 
Awfully bold statement regarding a future product we know very little about ... "will buy undisclosed product no matter what" seems kind of moronic.

Anybody following CPUs these days knows that Zen 2 will be Zen 1 (a proven success) on 7 nm, with other significant improvements. So how is it that we "know very little" about Zen 2? If I hadn't bought Ryzen 1 on release then I'd echo LightsOut41 - and I wouldn't appreciate being called a moron for it. Which adds nothing to the thread BTW.
 
I get it that only multiple independent reviews with purchased samples will show yada yada yada. But there's clearly some solid good news here. AMD is flatly claiming an ~29% performance increase in financial simulation - probably with a large contract dependent on that being true. And AMD certainly did not re-architect Zen to somehow cheat on this test! So it seems very likely that Zen 2 will have close to the same gain across the board. In fact, they'd have to do extra work to avoid such a result. Go AMD!
 
Anybody following CPUs these days knows that Zen 2 will be Zen 1 (a proven success) on 7 nm, with other significant improvements. So how is it that we "know very little" about Zen 2? If I hadn't bought Ryzen 1 on release then I'd echo LightsOut41 - and I wouldn't appreciate being called a moron for it. Which adds nothing to the thread BTW.

There are lots of variables. Yields could be low, diminishing returns of 7nm vs previous node shrinks, or AMD could decide that they finally have a winner and return to ~2005 Athlon 64 X2 pricing...

I agree. Things sound very positive for Zen 2, but I'd still argue it is wise to never make any decisions until we not only have final specs, but also have confirmed trusted 3rd party reviews on shipping chips.

Remember. Never pre-order :p
 
Went from a 5820k system to a 2700x. Was a great move, and being able to easily throw Zen 2 in is the cherry on the top. I'm done with Intel for quite a while at this point.
I also went from x99 to ryzen 2. Been a great experience and for sure the opportunity to drop in Zen 2 is great. I'm also done with Intel for now. Rooting for amd.
 
Blind loyalty is never a good thing gents. Zen2 looks like it should be a winner like AMD has had on the CPU side recently, but some silly very biased commentary being thrown around...
 
Blind loyalty is never a good thing gents. Zen2 looks like it should be a winner like AMD has had on the CPU side recently, but some silly very biased commentary being thrown around...

Unless you have proof that Zen2 is somehow inferior to Zen or Zen+ I don't see how this is somehow biased commentary.
 
I too have been itching at the bit to make the jump to an upgraded system, though I find today's offerings just... plainly... lacking in enough incentive to make me to press the "purchase" button in my shopping cart.

RTX is a let down in performance/price as it stands. This blossoms into a larger conversation, and though I would argue that what we are getting these days in a graphics card is more akin to a mobo, ram, and cpu combo... Knowing what we can get for the same money in the 10 series cards makes me question the validity of pricing for the 20 series. AMD just doesn't have enough performance to keep me interested. I love freesync, and hate the idea of paying for gsync, but they just aren't competitive enough right now in this market.

Intel isn't bringing anything new to the table with the 9th gen, just rehashing what they currently had to fit their pricing tiers with more cores/ more or less HT/moar heat. The soldered IHS was almost a marketing stunt seeing the thermal results from several review sites... I am still on a 2600K, running at 4.5Ghz+ (depends on the season, hello Arizona.) for over 5 years. Severely disappointed in Intel. AMD has me interested, but the 2700x missed the mark on a couple key scores for me. I am not a production person, and the scores that matter the most to me are often a mixture of gaming and productivity. This is an area that I really hope the the next gen can capture more of a gain on the IPC side of things against Intel.

I want to upgrade, I want to spend more money than I should. I just don't feel compelled too with the current state of the market. Ugh. Hopefully soon.
 
I never take corporate benchmarks about their own hardware too seriously. I always assume they set the tests up to show the most favorable outcome. Still, I'm excited to see how Zen 2 is going to look with the Rome architecture improvements. I really think that AMD has to hit 5GHz on their consumer and HEDT products, even at a power and efficiency sacrifice. That's the magic number consumers are looking for.
 
Better that AMD makes a statement like this well in advance of release of Zen 2 than pull an Intel and pay someone to put out fake numbers.

If I worked for AMD I'd put out a statement like this even if the IPC gain in all workloads was that high. Until you release the product you dont want Intel PR trying to steal your thunder like they seem to do these days.
I'm not saying AMD have done this but I'd love it if they did. :D
 
There are lots of variables. Yields could be low, diminishing returns of 7nm vs previous node shrinks, or AMD could decide that they finally have a winner and return to ~2005 Athlon 64 X2 pricing...
Agreed it's always good to wait for reviews, and TBH I find reviews +2-3 weeks for people to beta test it for me is always best ;) First driver revision is when I'll jump these days.
That said, yields will almost undoubtedly be high, the chiplets are less than 1/2 the size of Zen! It's a no brainer why they did that, for yields. AMD has multiple 7nm products to launch soon. Intel has one that didn't even hit a 50% yield with nothing else coming in the next year or so.
One has a viable process, the other is a dumpster fire.

That said, for high end and HEDT, I don't see why AMD can't charge more. When Intel does it you guys pay up 'because it's the best'. When Nvidia does it, you guys pay up too.
So if the performance and value is there, I have no issue with it. Just like when I paid about half a grand for a 2600k (in local prices), that turned out to be quite the investment didn't it?
 
I never take corporate benchmarks about their own hardware too seriously. I always assume they set the tests up to show the most favorable outcome. Still, I'm excited to see how Zen 2 is going to look with the Rome architecture improvements. I really think that AMD has to hit 5GHz on their consumer and HEDT products, even at a power and efficiency sacrifice. That's the magic number consumers are looking for.

You muh 5gigahertz at any cost people are hilarious. AMD already did exactly this in 2013 and it was pretty much a fail. https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/fx-9590
Intel tried this with their 9900k, it's hot expensive, terrible to cool and not very must faster than competing AMD stuff...

5GHz is where you don't want to be operating sillicon at a stock frequency. You're better off operating lower, with higher IPC or a wider design, like Zen ;)
4.5GHz is minimum most of us expect. I would expect OC to around 4.8, maybe 5GHz is possible if you don't care about efficiency on a good water loop. So yeah, you probably can have your 'muh 5gig' if you really want it.
 
Agreed it's always good to wait for reviews, and TBH I find reviews +2-3 weeks for people to beta test it for me is always best ;) First driver revision is when I'll jump these days.
That said, yields will almost undoubtedly be high, the chiplets are less than 1/2 the size of Zen! It's a no brainer why they did that, for yields. AMD has multiple 7nm products to launch soon. Intel has one that didn't even hit a 50% yield with nothing else coming in the next year or so.
One has a viable process, the other is a dumpster fire.

That said, for high end and HEDT, I don't see why AMD can't charge more. When Intel does it you guys pay up 'because it's the best'. When Nvidia does it, you guys pay up too.
So if the performance and value is there, I have no issue with it. Just like when I paid about half a grand for a 2600k (in local prices), that turned out to be quite the investment didn't it?

they could but i don't know if they will charge that much more(cost per core), it's more important to get a foothold in the market first then slowly increase prices once they have it locked down. they're playing the long game vs worrying about high margins right out of the gate which i'm sure is pissing off stock holders but i feel AMD really hasn't cared that much about them anyways, lol.
 
I would look forward to trying AMD again, I have no need of bunch of cores though, I predict 8 cores should be good for my needs for the following 2-3 years but I'm still in need of good IPC/clock speeds so hopefully AMD can step up there too so it becomes at least neck and neck with Intel (~15% advantage right now give/or take I'd say between CFL Refresh and 2700x) and I'd pick AMD for sure.

It's such a small gap to close in now and in the dire situation Intel is in, it seems like it's the golden opportunity now to at least get even with Intel in its only advantage.
 
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they're playing the long game vs worrying about high margins right out of the gate which i'm sure is pissing off stock holders but i feel AMD really hasn't cared that much about them anyways, lol.
LOL, got a good laugh out of me with that one, Sirmonkey! Quite true really, which is refreshing. I remember when I opened my company up to investors, it's such a double edged sword. Glad to be free of it now but I have the network and resources to take advantage of that without them.
You are probably right, they could have raised prices with Zen+ but didn't really, so you're right they'll probably boil the frog.
What I'm really loving is the sales on Zen and TR1 currently.. damn hard to avoid pulling the trigger. Only thing that does stop me is that glorious 7nm.

I have a feeling it's going to be hard to get 7nm parts for the first month or two, maybe worse than the 8700k... there is quite a lot of buzz about these parts building over the last year or so and it's becoming quite widely known in the community, even the less enthusiast users are finding out about it.
That said, AMD will be sitting on at least half a year of binned ex-EPYC production before it launches, so we might actually have quite decent stock levels, then it'll be down to the OEMs to have stock in their court too...
 
It's nice to see them be up front about the performance expectations, rather than sit on false expectations.

There was nothing false about it. The certain workloads part said enough and AMD are good but not that good to get a general 29% increase, it made sense at least to me.
 
When a manufacturer talks about up to 29% perf increases in certain loads, my brain has a built-in automatic interpolation changing it to 15~20% tops in more realistic scenarios. ;) But even so that would be a huge deal. Let's say 10% IPC improvement and 10% clock speed increase, doesn't sound too far fetched to me.
 
When a manufacturer talks about up to 29% perf increases in certain loads, my brain has a built-in automatic interpolation changing it to 15~20% tops in more realistic scenarios. ;) But even so that would be a huge deal. Let's say 10% IPC improvement and 10% clock speed increase, doesn't sound too far fetched to me.

Keep those expectations realistic!
Always be pleasantly surprised! :D
 
I'm very pleased with my recent 2700x build. (Okay, it did replace a 1090T, so I kinda expected big gains. Real big gains. ;) )

The 2700x has done well enough, that I'm telling my 4790k it better step up, or it'll be on the chopping block. It didn't say anything, but I noticed a bit of sweat on its upper lip.

Zen2 will find a place on one of my rigs.
 
When a manufacturer talks about up to 29% perf increases in certain loads, my brain has a built-in automatic interpolation changing it to 15~20% tops in more realistic scenarios. ;) But even so that would be a huge deal. Let's say 10% IPC improvement and 10% clock speed increase, doesn't sound too far fetched to me.

I know but aren't we all here to wait for the [H] review of the chip then decide what to do :) We can rely on Kyle to do some benchmarks :)
 
That said, yields will almost undoubtedly be high, the chiplets are less than 1/2 the size of Zen! It's a no brainer why they did that, for yields.

I thought chiplets were a Epyc (and possibly Threadripper) only thing. At least in this generation?

At least that's the impression I got from the combination of the New Horizons info and the other stuff that has leaked thus far.
 
I thought chiplets were a Epyc (and possibly Threadripper) only thing. At least in this generation?

At least that's the impression I got from the combination of the New Horizons info and the other stuff that has leaked thus far.

Hard to say at this point. It's kind of rare to have two completely separate processes for next gen. The Zen 2 core for desktop would have to be a very very heavy redesign of the EPYC chip to incorporate the IO back in.
 
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