When AMD first revealed their new architecture, the goal was for a 40% IPC uplift on top of Excavator. Over time, that got changed to 40%+ and now that Ryzen has launched, AMD has managed an astounding 52% IPC increase. Now that Ryzen samples have started to run in the wild, we can see some of the effects that IPC increase has had on single threaded performance.
In a recent benchmark listing, the Ryzen 7 1700X has shown off just what AMD has managed to do. In the single threaded metric, clocked the same as the Kaby Lake i5 7500, Ryzen was able to push past the Intel chip despite a clock speed deficit.
Clocking in at 3.4 GHz without boost, Ryzen scored 111 points while the i5 7500 managed the same score but had to clock at 3.8 GHz. Compared to the i7 7770 at 4 GHz which scores 121 points, the 1700X was only 8% slower while clocking in about 17% slower. Once we scale up the AMD scores, we can see that Zen does very well against Intel’s latest Kaby Lake.
As you all know, despite advances like DX12 and Vulkan, single-threaded performance is still a dominant factor in gaming and beyond. With just a 40% IPC gain, AMD would have only matched about a Haswell/Broadwell performance but now that we are seeing a 52% increase, Ryzen has a chance to exceed what Skylake/Kaby Lake can offer. While this is but one benchmark, I can’t wait to see if AMD has managed to seize not just the value proposition from Intel but the IPC performance crown as well.
