AMD has fit 50% more cores into each Zen 6 chiplet, and that change could matter more to PC users than the big performance number the company is leading with. According to VideoCardz, AMD has shared technical details about Zen 6 and Zen 6c, the two architectures inside its sixth-generation EPYC 9006 “Venice” server processors.
AMD claims an average 27% increase in instructions per clock over Zen 5 in selected server workloads. The test setup is worth knowing about, though. AMD ran 16 active Zen 6c cores on one chiplet against 16 Zen 5 cores split over two chiplets, with both clocked at the same speed. In enterprise and cloud workloads, the company reports a gain of around 20%, which is still healthy.
How many cores fit on a Zen 6 chiplet?
A regular Zen 6 chiplet now carries 12 cores instead of eight, and its shared L3 cache has grown from 32MB to 48MB. Zen 6c chiplets go from 16 cores to 32, while L3 cache rises from 32MB to 128MB. That gives every core in either version 4MB of L3 cache.
AMD has also let the cores keep more instructions in flight and revised branch prediction and integer scheduling. The new architecture brings full AVX-512 FP16 support, new Bit Matrix Multiply instructions, and four VNNI-INT8 pipelines instead of two. Both versions keep two threads per core and run the same instruction set. Zen 6 is tuned for higher clock speeds, and Zen 6c is tuned to fit more cores into the same space.
EPYC Venice supports up to eight chiplets, which allows for up to 96 Zen 6 cores or 256 Zen 6c cores. High-frequency models can reach 5.3GHz, and the platform supports PCIe 6.0 and DDR5 MRDIMM memory at up to 12,800 MT/s.
When will Zen 6 reach Ryzen desktops?
For anyone planning a desktop build, the 12-core chiplet is the change I’d keep an eye on. It could let AMD add more cores to Ryzen chips without adding more chiplets. However, AMD hasn’t confirmed how Zen 6 will be used in its consumer processors, and there is still no release date or desktop performance data for Zen 6 Ryzen chips. If you need a new PC soon, I wouldn’t hold out for Zen 6, at least not until AMD shares a rough timeline.