AMD is finally providing some details on its first Zen 6 CPU, which it has been teasing for over a year. The Epyc 9996 is a 256-core / 512-thread chip, packing AMD’s new Zen 6 architecture, and it’s the first to launch in what AMD describes as a “broad portfolio” for Venice. In addition to claiming significant performance advantages over the impending Nvidia Vera and Intel’s Xeon 6, AMD says it will continue to build out the Venice range with bespoke designs over the next year.
“It’s not just a single processor,” said AMD’s Ravi Kuppuswany, corporate VP of compute and enterprise solutions.q “It’s a portfolio.” AMD says it has purpose-built solutions, splitting its offerings depending on the application, not dissimilar to how Intel has split its Xeon ranges over the past few generations (nor how AMD has softly segmented its Epyc offerings). The roadmap starts with the main Venice lineup on the SP7 socket, which is what AMD has been teasing for so long. It scales up to 256 cores and 512 threads, 1.6 TB/s of memory bandwidth with fast MRDIMMs, and 128 PCIe 6 lanes in 1P configuration (160 lanes in 2P).
