Clock-to-Clock Comparison

AMD makes no pretense about "Zen+" being a refinement of "Zen," rather than a new micro-architecture. With refinements (eg: "Skylake" to "Kaby Lake"), any IPC uplift (clock for clock increase in performance) is a bonus. The company improved the on-die cache and memory controllers to bring down latencies, and its own claims for IPC uplift are rather modest at up to 3 percent. We tested it by comparing the Ryzen 7 2700X with the previous-generation Ryzen 7 1700X by disabling boost and XFR and jamming the clock speed at 3.50 GHz, and using memory at DDR4-3200.


The results are along expected lines. Across our bench, we've noticed small IPC uplifts ranging between -2% to +6%, averaging +1.91%. We'd normally discount anything under 2% as random variation, but 1.91% is closer to AMD's claim of +3% than zero, so we can give AMD the benefit of doubt on this one.