Any computing performance discussion starts with Moore’s law, which is slowing. Moore’s law states that computing performance will double every two years as chip sizes shrink and transistor density increases.

Lisa Su, in a keynote address at Hot Chips 31 reported by AnandTech, explained that companies have been improving their CPU (central processing unit) performance by leveraging various elements. These elements are process technology, die size, TDP (thermal design power), power management, microarchitecture, and compilers.

Process technology is the biggest contributor, as it boosts performance by 40%. Increasing die size also boosts performance in the double digits, but it is not cost-effective.

AMD used microarchitecture to boost EPYC Rome server CPU IPC (instructions per cycle) by 15% in single-threaded and 23% in multi-threaded workloads. This IPC improvement is above the industry average IPC improvement of around 5%–8%. However, all the above methods double performance in 2.5 years.