How is CPU performance improved? Frequency and IPC Popular Science

Whether it is AMD and Intel in the consumer market, or various domestic chip manufacturers in the commercial field, users judge the quality of CPU chip products. There\’s only one, and that\’s performance. Generally, users only need to look at the actual performance of the processor to judge CPU performance. In the industry, there is a standard judgment formula for CPU processor performance: CPU performance = IPC × frequency. This formula was first proposed by Intel and is widely recognized.

Nine-generation Core

We are all familiar with the frequency, which is the clock speed of MHz, which is also the most recent CPU has been a topic of hype for two years. The higher the frequency, the faster the processor instructions are executed. In practical applications, the higher the frequency, the faster the software opens, the less rendering time, and the higher the number of game frames.

When talking about frequency, we have to mention the hot CPU manufacturing process, which is the 14nm, 12nm, 7nm and other topics that everyone often hears. The nanometer process mentioned in these CPU semiconductor processes is not the size of the transistors in the chip, but the width of the transistor gate circuit on the chip. The width of the connection between the gate circuits is the same as the width of the gate circuit, so the line width is the process technology The description is currently mainly in nanometers (nm).

The smaller and more precise the process technology is, the smaller the width of the gate circuit is, and the transistors can be made smaller and denser, so the wafer will be smaller, and the chip itself will not become more complex. This reduces costs a lot.

Wafer

TSMC has said that the performance of these transistors remains unchanged, but the more advanced the process is, such as 14nm to 10nm, the more transistors the chip can carry. Therefore, the improvement of the process is mainly to reduce the heat and power consumption of the chip, so usually the frequency of the chip will also increase after the chip process technology increases.

The third generation of Ryzen based on TSMC\’s 7nm process

The IPC is very complicated. The full name is instruction per clock, translated as the number of instructions executed by the CPU in each clock cycle. IPC is determined by the design architecture of the processor. The design architecture determines the IPC level of the processor. Therefore, if you want to improve IPC, you must improve the design architecture. Make an upgrade.

Early Core Architecture

In the past few years, because the overall design architecture of the CPU market did not change much, The concept and volume of IPC are getting smaller and smaller. It is not until the arrival of AMD\’s Zen+ and Zen2 in the past two years that most people know that CPU performance does not only depend on frequency.

So CPU performance. The improvement not only depends on technological progress, the continuous upgrading of the architecture is also the key. The design and manufacturing of chips have their own set of logic and rules. The advancement of technology and architecture is time-consuming, laborious and expensive, and must be led by geniuses with unconstrained thinking. The progress of this industry can only be achieved step by step, and there is no such thing as luck or overtaking in corners.

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