If only the the PPC 970 was able to sustain an IPC of eight... it would've been a true miracle to run at 2GHz in 130nm (later 90nm). An IPC of ≥8 for more than a few cycles is something you'll only see during unrealistic micro-benchmarks (e.g. those used to reverse engineer their micro-architecture limits) on the widest of modern out-of-order CPU cores. To really sustain such an IPC in a real-world application workload you still need unusual applications and hardware e.g. a really wide VLIW DSP and *well* *optimised* assembler code.