- Aug 30, 2012
- 6,598
In terms of IPC performance, AMD has certainly closed the gap. The improved cache latency has also really helped and there are several benefits to buying a second-gen Ryzen CPU over a Coffee Lake CPU, so it's going to be exciting to watch the battle unfold in 2018 and beyond.
For the unaware, IPC (instructions per cycle) provides a good indicator of how fast a processor is and having both a high IPC with a high operating frequency is the best combination for maximum performance. Such is the case for Intel's 8th-Gen Coffee Lake CPUs, and although AMD is clearly trailing when it comes to frequencies, the company appears to have really closed in on Intel's IPC performance. That's likely the reason why so many of you have been asking for this kind of test.
To see how much headway AMD has made here, we're going to limit as many variables as we can, while also keeping things as realistic as possible. The first and most obvious step is to remove core frequency from the equation and to do this we've locked all of the CPU cores at 4GHz. Any type of boost technology has been disabled and the cores cannot go past 4GHz.
The second-gen Ryzen CPUs were tested on the Asrock X470 Taichi Ultimate and the Coffee Lake CPUs were on the Asrock Z370 Taichi. Both configurations used the same G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200 memory with the 'Xtreme' memory profile and the same MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio for all the testing.
We can say upfront that this article is in no way buying advice, but we're testing purely for the science of it.
More @ 4GHz CPU Battle: AMD 2nd-Gen Ryzen vs. Intel 8th-Gen Core