Performance per clock cycle (Instructions per Cycle, IPC) is a term we use iften here at Guru3D. With the Zen-2 architecture aka Ryzen 3000, Threadripper 3000 and Epyc Rome, AMD recently managed to raise the IPC by around 15 percent compared to Zen+ (Ryzen 2000).

If you have read the previous news, then ZEN3 will again offer more IPC, Ryzen 4000 in late  2020 - according to recent speculations, it could even be 17 percent. And the subsequent processor generations should also bring significant IPC gains.

Our colleagues from Anandtech interviewed AMD's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mark Papermaster. AMD wants to continue to bring new processors to the market in a 12 to 18-month cadence and thereby exceed the current industry standard of 7 percent annual IPC increase - converted to one and a half years, this would correspond to 10.7 percent.

"We have previously noticed that the industry is experiencing slow 7% annual growth in single-thread performance, and our goal is to outperform each generation of our products. With our latest products, we do better than that Industry cut off and industry expectations exceeded. "

A higher performance per cycle depends on several factors, but it is primarily influenced by refined manufacturing processes and, above all, the microarchitecture. Zen 3 is manufactured using the 7 nm EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) process and is said to offer a completely new core design. In addition, according to Papermaster, several teams are currently working on Zen 4, Zen 5 and even more distant generations of architecture.

AMD wants to increase performance per cycle by more than 7 percent annually