A new leak has alleged that AMD's Zen 6 line of desktop processors will be built upon a TSMC 2nm process with a reported 2026 release date in mind.
The news comes from prominent hardware leaker Moore's Law is Dead which its sources claim Team Red will be finalizing its architecture by Q3 2024. While this source states that: 'it's not 100% decided how much of the family will be 2nm' it is implied that the desktop flagship models will be much smaller than the current-gen.
It is claimed that there will be three variants in the Zen 6 lineup including 'Standard', 'Dense Classic' and 'Client Dense', with the latter option being the least efficient of the crop. 'Standard' is claimed to run on a mixture of P-cores and Venice E-cores, with latter options built to focus on cloud computing.
Interestingly, as noted by Hardware Times it's claimed that Zen 6 will feature an entirely new memory controller instead of using the same one in Zen 5. The flagship model appears to feature 64 PCIe 5.0 lanes and 32 PCIe 6.0 lanes with support for 16x DDR5-6400 RAM. It sounds plausible given it could still be around two years away.
MILD's sources claim that: 'Zen 6 is close to being as big of an undertaking as Zen 2 was'. For context, Zen 2 is the codename microarchitecture which powered the Ryzen 3000 series that debuted in 2019 and was built upon a new 7nm process. It was a sweeping improvement over the original Zen hardware's 14nm process.
A taste of things to come
While the early hints at what Zen 6 could have in store are encouraging, we're still yet to have Zen 5 officially announced by Team Red. Recent Zen 5 leaks and speculation hints that we'll get an official unveiling at Computex 2024 which is scheduled for early June, just a couple of weeks away.
The current crop of Zen 6 rumors appear plausible as a 2nm process as Zen 4 is built on a 5nm process. It's not too big of a leap as processors continue to get smaller with more transistors onboard. However, this has led to CPUs being hotter than ever before meaning water cooling has become a necessity, hence the lack of bundled coolers included as Team Red used to supply.
