AMD's Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs rumored to have higher than 15-17% IPC gains over current Zen 2 models, could utterly destroy Intel's Comet Lake-S lineup

With each successive Ryzen architecture iteration, AMD demonstrated that 10-15% improved single thread IPC gains over previous generations are not that hard to pull, even though that should not really be the case, at least if you ask seasoned CPU engineers. For the Zen 3 architecture powering the upcoming Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs, AMD has again planned a solid 15% IPC imrpovement over the Ryzen 3000 models, but rumor has it that these gains could potentially exceed expectations.

The rumor was brought to our attention by trusted leaker Ice Universe on the Weibo forums. Twitter user RetiredEngineer was kind enough to translate Ice Universe’s Chinese post, revealing that engineers at two well-known OEMs are already testing out Ryzen 4000 desktop CPU engineering samples and they noticed that the actual performance gains “have risen to an ‘alarming’ level.”

Further comparing these figures with performance numbers coming from Intel’s latest Comet Lake-S CPUs, the engineers appear to be confident that the Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs will “utterly beat Intel in both performance and power consumption.” Now, it is quite easy to imagine AMD’s superiority when it comes to power consumption, as the 7 nm EUV nodes at TSMC used to manufacture the Zen 3 CPUs are clearly better in this regard compared to whatever Intel has right now. As far as performance goes, however, Intel still remains unbeatable in games, although the performance gap is not that big. It looks like the engineers are suggesting that AMD’s upcoming CPUs could finally beat Intel in games, as well.

We are still unsure what these IPC gains could be, but the engineers claim that they are definitely better than 15-17%, which apparently is no mere feat. RetiredEngineer believes that such gains may lead to some diminishing returns  “given where we already are with ILP (instruction-level parallelism) and the physical constraints”.