AMD has taken the wraps off its Zen 6 architecture—and your next gaming chip might be a monster - PC Gamer
AMD has unveiled its next-generation Zen 6 CPU architecture, detailed through its new EPYC "Venice" server chips, promising significant performance gains for future desktop processors.
The details were shared in a technical deep dive on AMD's new EPYC "Venice" server chips, which are designed for data centers but signal a major leap for consumer CPUs.
A single Zen 6 core complex (CCD) can now hold 12 full-performance cores, a jump from the eight found in current Zen 5 designs, which helps reduce latency during multi-threaded tasks.
This increased density is complemented by a larger L3 cache, with each core maintaining 4 MB of cache, resulting in a total of 48 MB per CCD compared to 32 MB on an 8-core Zen 5 chip.
New "c" core variant
AMD has introduced a new "c" core type, which are scaled-down performance cores designed to handle multi-threaded workloads more efficiently than traditional efficiency cores.
A single Zen 6c core complex can accommodate 32 of these "c" cores, doubling the count of a Zen 5c equivalent, while also increasing the cache per core from 2 MB to 4 MB.
This configuration delivers a total of 128 MB of L3 cache, quadrupling the cache capacity of a fully-stocked Zen 5c version.
Clock speeds and IPC improvements
The full-fat Zen 6 cores on the Venice server chips have a maximum clock frequency of 5.3 GHz, while the Zen 6c cores top out at 4.1 GHz.
AMD has enhanced the branch prediction capabilities, expanding the return address stack from 52 to 64 entries and adding two branch predictions per cycle.
The company claims up to a 27% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) performance compared to Zen 5 in certain server workloads, a significant boost for the architecture.
3D V-Cache integration
One of the new Venice chips, the Venice-X 9006X SP7, will feature AMD's 3D V-Cache technology, with variants reaching up to 96 cores and 1152 MB of L3 cache.
This configuration provides 144 MB of L3 cache for every 12-core CCD, combining 48 MB of traditional cache with 96 MB of stacked 3D V-Cache.
Rumors suggest that the eventual Zen 6-based Ryzen desktop chips could reach clock speeds above 6 GHz, though this remains unconfirmed.
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