Definition[]
instructions per cycle (IPC) is the
| “ | [a]verage number of instructions executed per clock cycle in a processor. IPC depends on the processor design and on the code run. The product of IPC and clock speed yields the instruction execution rate of the processor.[1] | ” |
Overview[]
"IPC is a strong function of the underlying microarchitecture, or machine organization, of the CPU core. Many modern CPU cores use advanced techniques — such as multiple instruction dispatch, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, and speculative execution — to increase the average IPC. Those techniques all seek to execute multiple instructions in a single cycle by using additional resources to reduce the total number of cycles needed to execute the program."[2]