Intel's 7nm Ocean Cove architecture might deliver 80 percent gains to IPC and higher clocks in 2022: enough to catch up with 5nm AMD Ryzen 6000 Raphael?

A Weibo user has posted what appear to be estimates for process node and IPC improvements to Intel's upcoming core architectures, including Ocean Cove and Golden Cove. These were spotted by tipster @MebuiW.

According to the tipster, Ocean Cove, releasing in 2022 or 2023, will be Intel's first volume 7nm design and will deliver as much as an 80 percent increase to IPC relative to the Skylake architecture.

While AMD's not sitting still, this could be enough to deliver serious competition to Team Red's upcoming Ryzen 5000 series parts. In addition to increased IPC, the move to the 7nm process should enable Intel to up clock speeds further, perhaps even past the 5.5 GHz point.

This is somewhat ironic considering that Intel themselves abandoned the high clock speed push in favor of more cores: 10 GHz Pentiums never happened, but who knows what the future holds?

The rumor mill indicates that AMD could be making the move to the 5nm process as early as this year with its Ryzen 4000 desktop lineup. Even if this turns out not to be the case, AMD will almost certainly be on an enhanced 5nm process or better by the time Intel's purported 7nm Ocean Cove parts roll around.

It will be interesting to see if Intel's IPC gains with Ocean Cove will be enough to compete with AMD parts at that point.