AMD Demos Ryzen 7 Benchmarks Smoking Intel

AMD President and CEO, Dr. Lisu Su, took to the stage at AMD’s Ryzen Tech Day and opened the event with some official speeds, feeds, pricing information, and benchmark scores from the company’s upcoming Ryzen series processors. To date, we’ve seen a number of leaks with related data and benchmarks, but the numbers and information we’ll be presenting here are straight from AMD – they are the real deal, not rumors or speculation. And we’ve got a couple of surprises and new pieces of information to share as well.

As most of you probably know by now, AMD’s stated goal with Ryzen – which is based on AMD’s Zen microarchitecture -- was a 40% IPC (instructions per clock) uplift, with competitive frequencies, and power characteristics. Dr. Su, however, disclosed that AMD was actually able to increase IPC by approximately 52% with the final shipping product, sometimes more depending on the particular workload. We have said on a few occasions that a 40% IPC uplift wasn’t going to be enough to take on Intel at the high-end, but it appears AMD was being ultra-conservative with that 40% estimate. Intel has improved IPC by a few percentage points every generation for a number of years, which have resulted in some hefty aggregate performance gains for Core i-series processors. With a 52%+ IPC uplift per core, however, AMD is in a much stronger position moving forward, especially since Ryzen is a first generation part and the company will almost certainly have room to further optimize performance and power over time.