AMD has done a lot of work and they're truly back in the game. The might be long to watch but it's worth it. Enjoy!

It's fairly amusing to have AMD with the IPC crown for the first time since the Athlon 64, that's for sure.

My guess is silicon and moving electrons.

They widened the core and kept the core better fed.. And increased core counts. In lamens terms.

It's alright but AMD would have a more compelling product in their hands for gamers if they didn't have an external I/O die and did some more circuit layout topology optimizations to improve the frequency ...

SNY and MS are invested in and are using Zen 2 next gen, and now it's explained the Zen 2 performance increase is partially due to 'game cash'.

Thank you captain obvious!..

Right now, Intel are getting absolutely slaughtered in the server arena, and are able to compete in a few desktop situations but on the whole are behind, with their main saving grace being a mobile CPU design that looks to have a lot of potential if they can get it onto a better manufacturing process.

Hmm... why do I have deja vu all over again?

Well, that external I/O die serves a dual purpose: It allows to turn the CPUs into mass-produced CPU chiplets that can be used in a multitude of products without needing tons of different masks and for AMD to keep it's obligation with Globalfoundries in terms of minimum wafers they have to buy from them.

Besides, for an external I/O chip, the latencies are quite good.

I agree on the frequency, but I think the IPC was their priority, as it should be. Increased clock speeds will probably come with future chips.

I'm interested to see what Zen2 will do in Laptops and APUs early next year, and how they implement these. Will they keep the chiplet designs or go for a more monolithic design? And how will it fare against the newly announced Ice Lake chips there?

Frequencies are good, you folks need to remember these TSMC/Samsung nodes are rather young and have been designed for low power densities, the opposite of Intel's on both counts. Not to mention that even if the chip allowed, to jump from like 3.6 to 4.8 GHz would likely double power consumption, or close to it.

Hopefully, AMD will just go back to monolithic at least in the desktop/mobile space once their obligations with GF are met by the end of 2021 because consumer applications are still sensitive to latencies ... 

AMD still needs to bake some more timing optimizations into their future micro-architectures ... 

Personally, I'm more interested in future processors based on Zen 4/5 or maybe something even from Intel if they get their shit together to replace my 6600K. New features like PCIE5, USB4, and DDR5 are a must have in my new system. I don't know if I'll go with 8 or 16 cores ... (probably 8 though since I'll just save 16 cores in the future for PCIE6/DDR6)