Today's good news about the graphics card GPU and CPU is really a lot, RTX 4090 confirmed to start testing, Zen4, Zen5 performance basic confirmation, etc., must make the small partners who are holding the money bag and looking forward to it very excited. However, for their performance, because it is not yet possible to test directly on 3DMark, CINEBENCH, and various games, there is only one basic description, and the two words involved in it may make small partners wonder, that is, IPC and energy efficiency ratio.
First of all, we must understand that the increase of these two indicators by one percent does not mean that the performance of the actual hand has increased by how much, things are a bit complicated, Xiaobian to talk about it separately. The full name of IPC is Information Per Clock (instructions per clock cycle), which means that at the same frequency, the higher the IPC, the more work the CPU does, or the more efficient at the same frequency. For example, now compared with Core, the frequency under similar performance is significantly lower, which should be higher than IPC.
There are generally two ways to improve IPC, the first of course is to optimize the processing line and structure. For example, increase the practical instruction set, so that the CPU can more directly understand the needs of the system or software for calculation, without front-end translation, decomposition tasks; or increase the speed of front-end translation decomposition tasks, cache capacity, etc., so that the CPU does not have to wait for instructions or memory communication, there is always work to do not idle; in addition, simply and rudely increase the core is also a way.
The energy efficiency ratio is similar to that of an IPC, except that performance is divided by power consumption rather than frequency. For example, the performance of the RTX 4090 is said to increase by tens of percent, but its TGP (full graphics card power consumption) has been determined to be around 600W, which is an exaggerated 71% higher than the RTX 3090 (350W), and if its performance improvement does not reach this level, the energy efficiency ratio is reduced. By the way, the energy efficiency ratio of the RTX 3090 Ti is actually decreasing.
Understanding these two indicators, Xiaobian also has to say something off-topic. First of all, it is not necessarily easy to use the CPU with a high IPC, because the work it does does not necessarily meet the needs of the software, the theoretical calculation test is very good, and the CPU with the software running speed is not the same. For example, dozens of core server CPUs are not necessarily useful for office games, because the operating system and software cannot make it run full. The comparison of game frame rates at different core numbers that we have introduced is very telling.
Secondly, the energy efficiency ratio has less to do with the actual performance performance, it is more about limiting the limits of the CPU and gpu itself. For example, AMD's GPU architecture is more inclined to energy efficiency ratio, but what about actual performance? There is no advantage over NV graphics cards that "take off" in power consumption. Of course, high energy efficiency is more friendly to power supply and heat dissipation than the chip, the overall cost is low, and there is more room for improvement, and the N card has reached 600W, and it is really necessary to consider changing the architecture, otherwise the small partner will soon be able to afford the graphics card with no power supply!