AMD’s Ryzen “Raphael” CPUs will reportedly boast a 20+% IPC gain – Zen 4 details leak

AMD’s hard at work on their next-generation Zen 4 architecture, the new CPU cores that will power the company’s future Ryzen and EPYC processors. With Zen 4, AMD plans to offer products that are highly competitive, cementing their market share gains with Zen 3 while pushing for increased sales in all markets. 

According to Moore’s Law is Dead, AMD’s Zen 4 architecture will deliver new features to AMD’s Ryzen and EPYC CPU lineups, adding support for AVX-512, PCIe 5.0 (on EPYC Genoa CPUs Only), and a new 6nm I/O die. 

According to his sources. AMD is targeting a 20+% increase in IPC over Zen 3, delivering increased performance across a wide range of applications. That said, IPC increases will not deliver the same results across all applications, which means that AMD’s performance gains will be above and below that value depending on your chosen applications. 

IPC Gains, What Are They? 

CPU leaks often discuss IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) gains, and the term is often misused as a generic value that applies to all applications. A 20% reported IPC gain would not give you 20% more performance in all applications, as that is not how CPU architecture work. 

When companies quote IPC gains, they are typically discussing performance gains across a range of applications. More often than not, these IPC gains are listed as an average value. AMD’s reported 19% IPC gains with Zen 3 were tested across a variety of applications, some of which had single-digit performance gains while others had gains of well over 20%. Some software will love the architectural changes within new CPUs, while others will not see much, or any, benefit. 

We already know that AMD’s Zen 4 architecture will move the company to a 5nm node, and AMD’s Rick Bergman has confirmed that AMD’s next-generation Zen 4 architecture will feature “a similar long list” of improvements as Zen 3. This factor will ensure that AMD’s performance gains come from a large number of areas, making it more likely for AMD to see performance gains across practically all applications. 

Zen 4 is due to feature a major node shift and a large architectural shift. Both of these factors are big deals for CPU makers, and having both on a single product is sure to deliver tremendous performance improvements. 

Why AVX-512

AVX-512 is one of the main areas where Intel’s products have a clear advantage over AMD’s equivalents. By adding support for AVX-512, AMD has an opportunity to take away AVX-512 as a perceived negative from AMD’s Zen lineup. AVX-512 is most important within the enterprise/server market, where AMD plans to gain market share from Intel. 

Intel’s Ice Lake server processor marketing focused heavily on AVX-512, and if AMD supports AVX-512 with Zen 4, Intel’s AVX-512 focused marking approach will be a lot less effective. With every new iteration of Zen, AMD wants to eliminate all perceived negatives of its CPU product lines. We have already seen how AMD’s gaming focus has improved Ryzen’s performance on desktop; we expect a similar approach with AVX-512.