> Zen 2 is a seriously formidable chip, but most of the benefit came from cleaning up nasty edge cases in performance, like cross core communication being slowe

> Zen 2 is a seriously formidable chip, but most of the benefit came from cleaning up nasty edge cases in performance, like cross core communication being slower than a spill to DRAM. You can't disentangle the shrink from the architecture, because they happened simultaneously. AMD seems to disagree. In their "Next Horizon Gaming Tech Day General Session" last year they claimed that ~40% of the Zen 2 performance improvements came from "Design Frequency and 7nm Process", while the remaining ~60% are from "IPC-Enhancements" ([1] slide 13). As the frequency is directly related to the process it's obvious that moving to TSMC's 7nm process played a pretty important role for the performance improvements. [1]: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/HK00TfQ8ibUlLR https://www.slideshare.net/secret/HK00TfQ8ibUlLR