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MSI Drops First Hint of AMD Increasing AM4 CPU Core Counts

dirtyferret said:
wake me when they finally break 185 points on the cinebench single thread test

cinebench_single.png
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Wake up - Overclock a 2700x further?
And take a look at the 7740x it's the king of single thread
 
I am hoping Zen 2 surpasses Intel for IPC. That would get a fire under both manufacturers and lead to some real improvement after the CPU space has been stagnant since SKT1366.
 
dj-electric said:
I'd really like an IPC increase instead of moar cores. Just this once. I know that its an insane request, but that would be really cool... Leave cinebench records for TR4
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There is another rumor going around that Zen 2 will have a 15%+ IPC Increase and 10% higher clockspeeds. So yeah, don't worry ;)
 
Could someone explain this IPC thing to me?
If Intel hasn't upped that for years now, is it even possible? The core count is something different, there was no push for that. But IPC... why not? People wold buy such CPU like crazy.
 
Octopuss said:
Could someone explain this IPC thing to me?
If Intel hasn't upped that for years now, is it even possible? The core count is something different, there was no push for that. But IPC... why not? People wold buy such CPU like crazy.
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IPC is just a buzz word over here for some reason, and just one factor in performance. I guess it makes you look smart if you can put IPC in a sentence.
 
Octopuss said:
Could someone explain this IPC thing to me?
If Intel hasn't upped that for years now, is it even possible? The core count is something different, there was no push for that. But IPC... why not? People wold buy such CPU like crazy.
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Instructions Per Clock. It is the term used to refer to getting higher performance if clock speeds and core counts aren't increased.

If you were to bench an R5 2400X against a Phenom II x4 980 - the 2400X would absolutely crush it. They both have the same amount of cores and clockspeed.


P.S. Yes lol, it is possible to increase IPC. AMD increased it by ~55% between Piledriver vs Zen 1. Intel hasn't really changed architectures since Haswell (2013).
 
Octopuss said:
Could someone explain this IPC thing to me?
If Intel hasn't upped that for years now, is it even possible? The core count is something different, there was no push for that. But IPC... why not? People wold buy such CPU like crazy.
Click to expand...
IPC stands for Instructions Per Clock, which essentially means "how fast a CPU is at [task X/set of tasks Y/an approximation of all possible tasks] if core count and clock speed are equalized across comparisons".

In other words, if you compare, say, a Core2Quad, a Kaby Lake i5, a Ryzen 3 and a Phenom x4 (all of which have 4 cores and threads), over-/underclock them all to the same frequency, and then benchmark them, you'll end up with a chart of their relative IPC. Of course, this is dependent on both the benchmarks used (as different architectures perform differently in different tasks - as an example, Ryzen overperforms in Cinebench and rendering tasks compared to some other tasks when compared to modern Intel archs) and the various idiosyncrasies of the architecture. Both cache, uncore clock speeds, RAM speed, interconnect speeds and a whole host of lower-level factors affect IPC. As an example, the IPC increase between Zen and Zen+ (Ryzen 1st and 2nd gen) comes mostly from lower cache latencies and better optimized inter-chip communication.

As such, IPC is
a) always an approximation, not to mention task-dependent, and really a summary of a lot of lower-level, difficult to identify performance parameters
b) still a reasonable term for speaking of the performance of an architecture regardless of core count and clock speed.

For example, AMD's FX-series CPUs had lots of cores and sometimes crazy clock speeds, yet were trounced by Intel due to the Core architecture's significantly superior IPC. Which is how a 3.5GHz 4c4t i5 could outperform a 8c8t FX in >90% of tasks. The cores and the clock speed don't matter if the cores are processing fewer instructions per clock (cycle).

As for how/why Intel's IPC hasn't improved in years, it's due to their roadmap shakeup (going from the "tick-tock" release rythm (where one was an architecture refresh, the other a production process node improvement) to the current (yet not really followed) "PAO" or "Process, Architecture, Optimization") and their ever expanding issues with getting their next-gen 10nm process node into volume production.

To clarify: Intel is currently using the 14nm node, either in 14nm+ or 14nm++ versions. The latter two are minor improvements upon the initial 14nm process node, which was launched alongside Broadwell in 2014 (mobile) and 2015 (desktop). As such, Broadwell was a "tick" (process shrink) (although Broadwell was also architecturally different from its predecessor, but never mind that right now). Skylake, following Broadwell, was a "tock", or an architecture improvement. Architecture improvement = IPC increase, at least most of the time.

Then came the issues. 10nm was supposed to launch in 2016. That didn't happen. Instead we got Kaby Lake, which is identical to Skylake architecturally, but produced on an optimized process node (14nm+) which gives it higher clock speeds. Hence the jump in performance from the 6700k to the 7700k was tiny, due to there being only the few-hundred-MHz increase in clock speed to make it faster.

The 10nm issues and delays keep piling up. Currently, it's delayed to 2019, and some (SemiAccurate, among others) believe it won't even be ready by then. Intel has one or two gimped, barely-functional 10nm CPUs out now, which seems like an effort to calm irate investors demanding progress.

As such, Intel has launched Coffee Lake instead. Again, Coffee Lake is architecturally unchanged from Kaby Lake (and thus Skylake), at least in terms of IPC. Of course, Coffee Lake has more cores, is slightly more power efficient (but really not much), and clocks even higher. As such, Coffee Lake CPUs are faster, but their IPC is unchanged. The performance increase comes from small clock increases and a significant increase in cores and threads (i7 from 4/8 to 6/12, i5 from 4/4 to 6/6, and i3 from 2/4 to 4/4).

The reason for Intel doing this is likely that the next "process" step of their "PAO" cadence is yet to show up. As such, they're reiterating "O" (Optimization) steps to tread water until 10nm is ready. To recap, currently Broadwell/14nm was P(rocess), Skylake was A(rchitecture), and both KBL and CFL are O(ptimization). All the while, AMD is catching up, and improving both IPC and moving to smaller process nodes rapidly. If this keeps up, it won't be long until they catch up.
 
Hmm. Logic says that IPC is clearly defined, and not affected by anything. Faster cache can't make the CPU magically process five IPC instead of four, if that is how the CPU is made, can it?
I know nothing about all this, but it seems like people are incorrectly saying IPC increase instead of performance increase.
 
Octopuss said:
Hmm. Logic says that IPC is clearly defined, and not affected by anything. Faster cache can't make the CPU magically process five IPC instead of four, if that is how the CPU is made, can it?
I know nothing about all this, but it seems like people are incorrectly saying IPC increase instead of performance increase.
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Nope. IPC is a shorthand for something like "all performance parameters intrinsic to a CPU except for clock speed and core/thread count" (although some vendors include SMT as an IPC improvement, as it effectively processes more instructions per clock cycle in the same hardware).

After all, if IPC was "clearly defined, and not affected by anything", you'd either have an incredibly simple CPU or an absolutely perfect CPU with zero bottlenecks (which is both impossible and would be extremely impractical to attempt). And of course faster cache can make the CPU process more instructions per clock if the various processing blocks in the CPU are bottlenecked by cache bandwidth or latency. Pretty much all CPUs have either too little or too slow cache (as increasing cache size also increases latency), so there's always a push to optimize cache size and latency and find a sweet spot for this. And that's just one of the myriad factors affecting CPU performance internally. Pipeline length and width affects IPC, as do all the various functional blocks along the pipeline - both how many of them there are and how they work, as well as how efficiently they can be fed instructions (where the various caches come into play). Then there's branch prediction (of Spectre fame) and all the stuff attached to that - time penalties from mispredictions, time gains from caching correct predictions for repeated instructions, and all the other tricks and tweaks CPU designers have figured out over the years.

Remember, even what constitutes an "instruction" varies across CPU architectures (as they all support varying instruction sets, even within the X86 family). And different instructions require different resources and different amounts of time to be processed. IPC, in other words, is an abstraction that approximates an extremely complex set of performance parameters. Intel's inclusion of AVX-512 instruction decoding hardware on recent HEDT chips is a good example. It's an extremely useful term, as it lets us discuss performance on a less variable level than if we had to include clock speeds and core counts, which to a certain degree obfuscate the true performance of a CPU design.
 
Octopuss said:
Hmm. Logic says that IPC is clearly defined, and not affected by anything. Faster cache can't make the CPU magically process five IPC instead of four, if that is how the CPU is made, can it?
I know nothing about all this, but it seems like people are incorrectly saying IPC increase instead of performance increase.
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IPC increase, as long as clock speed is the same, equals higher performance. There are even cases such as Zen architecture (VS Bulldozer / Piledriver) where a significant drop in base / turbo clock speeds still produces much higher performance.

Higher performance doesn't necessarily mean higher IPC because you can have better performance due to higher clock speeds while not touching IPC. The more recent Intel architectures are a prime example of this: the base / turbo clock speeds increased and so did the performance but the IPC stayed pretty much the same.

Due to how Zen architecture works, if you can reduce the latency (by whatever means), the chips increases performance: it's why it's much better to pair a Zen based chip with faster memory (as long as it's supported by the board used). If AMD can manage to reduce latency (as apparently they did in Ryzen 2000 VS 1000 series) in subsequent Zen based architectures, that already translates into an IPC increase, by itself.
 
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brian111 said:
I don't know how well a ten or even twelve core cpu would run on a four phase motherboard.
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Depends on how power efficient it is. Given that Zen 2 is the first major redesign and is on a smaller node, I suspect that it will run just fine. Current Zen+ chips are very efficient at the same core clock as previous gen.

cucker tarlson said:
They'd still be slower than 8 core intels, but I bet that using 6 core ccx's can bring those 12 cores very,very close to i5 levels in gaming. Now 2700x usually gets beaten even by 8400,and I personally blame the ccx-ccx latency.


Yup,otherwise it won't bring any changes. 12 core ryzen would still get beaten by a 6 core i5 in gaming.
I bet if people could get i5 8600k performance in gaming and 7900x performance in productivity tasks at $400-$420 then most of them would not choose the 9th gen i7. Hell, I might even be tempted. Me, a known Intel shill :laugh: Let's just take it easy for now cause the bubble might burst.
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Intel has yet to come out with an 8 core CPU that's on the ringbus topology. Intel's current 8 core HEDT CPUs take a performance hit from their mesh architecture and have worse IPC than Zen+. Ringbus is only good for low core counts. Intel is in a pinch right now as it either has to hope the performance hit from an 8 core ringbus isn't too bad or it has to move it's 8 core desktop part over to mesh and accept that their IPC lead is gone.

Zen 2 could have zero architectural improvements and the node shrink alone would give them enough of an IPC, die space, and power savings boost to beat Intel's upcoming offerings which look very dim.

There's a reason they brought Kim Keller on board, they need something other then the annual 3% IPC boost and the cost of increasing die sizes is getting to them.

Vayra86 said:
IPC is just a buzz word over here for some reason, and just one factor in performance. I guess it makes you look smart if you can put IPC in a sentence.
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IPC is really the best measure of performance for people on this forum, so that's probably why it's so popular. If you want to talk about multi-threaded performance or memory performance, there are the handbrake and microsoft certified professional forums for those respectively.

It would be great if more applications were able to tap more memory performance or more cores but as it stands right now IPC is king for consumers, enthusiasts, and gamers.
 
evernessince said:
Zen 2 could have zero architectural improvements and the node shrink alone would give them enough of an IPC, die space, and power savings boost to beat Intel's upcoming offerings which look very dim.
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No. If the arch is unchanged, IPC won't change either. All the rest is true, though. Zen+ IPC with an extra 500MHz clock speed and better power scaling at high clocks from the improved process? That would be sweet.
 
Xx Tek Tip xX said:
Wake up - Overclock a 2700x further?
And take a look at the 7740x it's the king of single thread
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meh still sleeping, most review sites like toms, techspot, and techpowerup could not get it past the 4.3ghz base. I found guru3D gets an A for effort to get it to 4.4ghz (183 single thread) through liquid cooling.

index.php
 
Bu.. but.. but mah single thread performance! Mah gaymes fps!
 
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GoldenX said:
Bu.. but.. but mah single thread performance! Mah gaymes fps!
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My single core CPU is much more powerful core v core than your dual core. Remember that argument? It happened each step of the way from single to dual to quad. Also, there is not a whole lot of titles out there that support single thread only anymore. Atleast anything new. On most of the old stuff that does modern systems are so fast it doesn't really matter.

Lets talk about the most recent causality to the IPC argument, The 7700K. Even mondo overclocked there is simply not enough power to keep up with 6 and 8 core CPUs. That thing went into obsolescence with the quickness. I suspect the 8700K will reach the same fate if we get 12-16 cores on mainstream desktops.
 
srsbsns said:
My single core CPU is much more powerful core v core than your dual core. Remember that argument? It happened each step of the way from single to dual to quad. Also, there is not a whole lot of titles out there that support single thread only anymore. Atleast anything new. On most of the old stuff that does modern systems are so fast it doesn't really matter.

Lets talk about the most recent causality to the IPC argument, The 7700K. Even mondo overclocked there is simply not enough power to keep up with 6 and 8 core CPUs. That thing went into obsolescence with the quickness. I suspect the 8700K will reach the same fate if we get 12-16 cores on mainstream desktops.
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Very good reply, but you missed the sarcasm. I'm paraphrasing the Intel fanboys.
 
I for one will certainly vouch for Johan on this being the real deal.
 
Let him dream in peace.
 
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