I suspect the improvements are even more dramatic going from Zen 1 through to Zen 5. AMD has really hit the jackpot with how scalable the Ryzen CPU is considering how they're able to improve the performance from year to year. This is a stark difference to the FX series during the 2010s, which saw very small YoY performance increases by comparison. Ryzen really is AMD's equivalent to what Nehalem/Core was for Intel back in the mid 2000s.
Part of the reason we didn't see much in the way of YoY improvements for Bulldozer, is that AMD almost immediately abandoned it and threw resources at Zen after it launched.
Steamroller did see 30% IPC improvements over Bulldozer (all the design work would have been done before they switched to Zen), but AMD canceled the full FX version, and only ever shipped the APU version of Steamroller (with only 2 modules, aka 4 threads).
If they had shipped a Steamroller FX cpu, the generational improvements would have looked similar to many of the generational improvements that Zen received... but didn't really matter as Bulldozer started so far behind.
Yokolos · · focus · HN ↗
phire · · focus · HN ↗
Steamroller did see 30% IPC improvements over Bulldozer (all the design work would have been done before they switched to Zen), but AMD canceled the full FX version, and only ever shipped the APU version of Steamroller (with only 2 modules, aka 4 threads).
If they had shipped a Steamroller FX cpu, the generational improvements would have looked similar to many of the generational improvements that Zen received... but didn't really matter as Bulldozer started so far behind.