IPC Gains

[AYDANN6ix9ine]

What are the IPC improvements?:

 

Sandy Bridge to Coffee Lake

Sandy Bridge to Zen 14nm

Sandy Bridge to Zen+ 12nm

Sandy Bridge to Zen FinFet 14nm (Ryzen 5 2400G)

[Crunchy Dragon]

Sandy Bridge to Coffee Lake will have the highest IPC gains, I forget the actual percentages, but I wanna say somewhere in the region of 25-30% gain.

Sandy Bridge to Zen+ will be similar numbers, albeit slightly lower.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

I too have been wondering what IPC improvements we've seen over time, although over a wider range.  Of the ones the OP listed, I think I'd agree with @Crunchy Dragon that to (dang no "lake" emoji?) would be the biggest jump.

 

Quick note... I think of IPC as basically single-threaded performance at a given clock speed.  When comparing processors of different generations, if CPU 2 is 1.5x faster than CPU 1 using the same application (that's not specifically optimized for the newer CPU but runs fine on the old one), then CPU 2 has 50% better IPC.  Adjustments can be made for different clock speeds.

 

For example, the Core 2 Duo T7250 in my dad's old laptop got 49 in Cinebench R15 on 1 thread at 2 GHz.  My laptop's i7-6700K gets about 176 at 4 GHz.  After adjusting for clock speed, I find that in that example, the i7-6700K has about 79.6% ((176/2)/49) better IPC than the T7250.

 

So what about other generations?  What were the IPC gains (over their predecessors) with

• 8008
• 8080
• 8085
• 8086
• 286
• 386 DX
• 386 SX
• 486 DX
• 486 SX
• 486 DX2
• 486 DX4
• Pentium P5
• P54C
• P54CQS
• P54CS
• Pentium MMX P55C
• Pentium Pro
• Pentium II Klamath
• P2 Deschutes
• Pentium III Katmai
• P3 Coppermine
• P3 Tualatin
• Pentium 4 (NetBurst) Williamette
• P4 Northwood
• P4 Gallatin
• P4 Prescott
• P4 Cedar Mill
• Pentium D Smithfield
• PD Presler
• Conroe (Core)
• Kentsfield
• Penryn
• Wolfdale
• Yorkfield
• Nehalem
• Bloomfield
• Lynnfield
• Westmere
• Gulftown
• Sandy Bridge
• Ivy Bridge
• Haswell
• Devil's Canyon
• Broadwell
• Skylake
• Kaby Lake
• Coffee Lake
• Whiskey Lake
• Cannon Lake
• Ice Lake
• Tiger Lake
• Alder Lake
• Meteor Lake
• Palm Cove
• Sunny Cove
• Willow Cove
• Golden Cove
• Ocean Cove
• ???

I'm sure I missed some, and got a few others out of order.  I was also going to do a list of all AMDs offerings, from Am286, through K5, K8 Sledgehammer, Athlon 64 X2, Bulldozer, Zambezi, Excavator, Summit Ridge, Pinnacle Ridge, Matisse, Vermeer, Zen 4/5, etc, but got too lazy.   Oh and we can't forget Cyrix, Harris, TI, Fairchild Semiconductor, Honeywell (or was it "Farewell Honeychild"?), whoever else I missed.

 

I've heard that some early generations had some pretty nice next-gen IPC gains, like upwards of 100% or more from 8086 > 286, 386 > 486, 486 > P5.  (An older Tom's Hardware article claims "the 80286 was 3.6 times faster than the 8086 at the same frequency.")

 

I'd love for Sunny Cove, or whatever architecture Jim Keller is working on at Intel, to catch up to where we would be if those per-(generation / stepping / codename_change / die_shrink / brand_\model_name_change) improvements had not slowed down (from that TH 3.6x reference).   I'm also hoping for the same for Zen 5 (or whatever the first generation on AM5 / PCIe 5.0 / DDR5 is).  In the meantime I'd like to see Matisse jump as far ahead (in IPC, remember) of Coffee Lake Refresh (or better yet, Ice Lake), as how far Bulldozer / Piledriver / Excavator was behind Kaby Lake.

At minimum, I'd like upcoming 2019 CPUs to score at least 200-250 in Cinebench R15 single-threaded at under 3.5-4.0 GHz.

 

And by the time I'm ready to replace my desktop's 4790K when DDR5, PCIe 5.0 & AM5 are all released, I'd like that new CPU to be as much faster single-threaded than my 4790K across all threads, as a single 4790K thread is faster than both cores of the Athlon 64 X2 4000+ I had previously owned.  Multi-threaded, I'd like the same price-to-performance-per-time jump as my dad had with going from a ~$300 286-10 in January 1989 to a $102 486 DX4-120 in October 1995.