Higher IPC is relevant for workloads that are compute- but not data-intensive. There are practically no common server applications with that characteristic. In

Higher IPC is relevant for workloads that are compute- but not data-intensive. There are practically no common server applications with that characteristic. In high performance computing, you might find some such applications, e.g. some Monte-Carlo-Type simulations, some linear-algebra-heavy workloads. Of course especially the latter are reported in popular benchmarks like the Top500, so marketing puts a special emphasis on those. But even there, raw IPC is mostly useless, since common problem sizes make a lot of network communication necessary to e.g. solve computational fluid dynamics problems. For those you'd need both IPC and (low latency and high bandwith) I/O, because one machine won't be enough and you have to do clustered computations with lots and lots of I/O-intensive communication to transmit your boundary results to your neighboring machines. But run-of-the-mill server workloads are more like database applications (get query, load data from mass storage, do some processing on it, send results to network), HTTP and similar servers (get request, load data from mass storage, do some processing on it, send results to network), file servers (load/store data from network, only a little processing), terminal servers (wait for user interaction on network, process/load/store a bit, shovel out screen updates). Lots and lots of I/O, not so much computation that would care about IPC.