What is IPC?

Short for instructions per cycle: the number of instructions executed per clock. It expresses design efficiency; performance is roughly IPC times clock frequency. Its reciprocal is CPI.

Field: CPUs and architecture

IPC in the explanations

Questions that mention IPC (3)

  1. What is the processor design called that issues and executes multiple instructions simultaneously in one clock cycle?
  2. Which metric indicates the number of instructions executed per clock?
  3. Which correctly describes a CPU with a clock frequency of 3 GHz?

Related terms

Superscalar Out-of-order execution Branch prediction Amdahl's law Cache coherency Cache memory DMA (direct memory access) DVFS (dynamic voltage and frequency scaling) GPU Instruction set architecture (ISA)

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