is the foreman on a worksite directing what tasks go to what parts of the ‘job site’ and who will work on what (i.e. To think of what an instruction scheduler is and does… is to imagine the I.S. Let the shear audacity sink in… and then realize that Intel is perfectly happy, and consider it a good return on their investment, when their new architecture is 5-10% better than their old one.ĭrilling down further each core in the CCX can not only handle two threads at once but AMD has given the Zen design a much-needed performance boost thanks to a much quick instruction scheduler. To put this goal in to perspective they basically wanted to create a design that when running at a mere 2.8Ghz could perform the same as a 4Ghz Excavator core. This is how Zen came about… and the dream of Zen was rather ambitious – to create a new design that had a 40% higher IPC than Excavator. So AMD knew they had a problem, they knew they were falling further and further behind – to the point where simply pushing the speed of the core would not let them stay competitive – and they decided to do something about it. This is why even though AMD’s Excavator team have refined the underlying design and reached performance levels they could have only imagined of when its ancestor Bulldozer was created Intel has been able to outpace them.ĪMD really is the scrappy underdog of the computer world and their ‘make do with less’ attitude is why they are the only x86 CPU manufacture to still be standing and not be crushed into dust by the Intel juggernaut. When ‘you’ as a company can literally throw hundreds and hundreds of millions and dollars at CPU architecture design every year ‘you’ can release a new architecture a lot faster than a company with a lot less resources. This should come as no surprise as Intel literally has a yearly research and development budget in the ten-figure range. This is not because of a lack of talent and simply a lack of resources. This is the area that AMD has fallen a bit behind in when compared to Intel.
Oh sure the overall performance will go up when comparing a 3Ghz to a 4Ghz version of the same design, but the actual number of instructions per clock cycle it can handle will be the same. IPC or Instructions Per Clock is a simple, yet effective, method of judging how efficient a CPU design is as it does not matter how fast the core is clocked, it does not matter how many cores there are… as the IPC of a design will remain the same. The reason that Intel has been able to outperform AMD’s processors can be summed up in one simple acronym: IPC.