IPC is always going to be a number that is dependent on your particular workload. Searching through a huge linked list laid out randomly in memory is going to

IPC is always going to be a number that is dependent on your particular workload. Searching through a huge linked list laid out randomly in memory is going to measure just your memory latency. An optimized media codec might tend to just measure your execution resources. But really you want to measure all sorts of additional things like the out of order engine depth, the strength of the branch predictor and prefetcher, and the latencies and sizes of all the different cache levels. And it's hard to get a good measure of all the stuff within a chip and especially stress the branch predictor and prefetcher without having a working set that sometimes spills over into main memory. And really you want to include the efficiency of your memory controller in your rating of the chip too. But if you have a particular workload in mind some of these aspects might not important to you and you'd be best served by just benchmarking your particular application on a given chip.