Latest rumours suggest that AMD may be working on multiple Zen 6 designs, each targeting a different density and efficiency. If true, buying a Ryzen CPU could become a bit complicated – but we will be here to guide you.
According to Moore’s Law is Dead, AMD has three Zen 6 variants: Standard, Dense Classic, and Client Dense. The latter aims to be the most jam-packed at the expense of efficiency. We’re talking about up to 50% denser, which would cut die space in half, allowing AMD to cram double the die count per silicon wafer. Hopefully, these savings trickle down to customers through cheaper CPUs.
AMD expects to finalise the overall designs of this architecture around Q3 2024. That said, it seems that Team Red has not yet settled on how much of Zen 6 will use the 2nm manufacturing node. If this takes too much longer, it could delay the chips to 2026. According to the leaker’s information, we know at least the 16- and 32-core variants will use 2nm.
MLID added that while AMD originally planned to use a near-identical memory controller to Zen 5 for its successor, plans have changed drastically. Instead, Zen 6 is getting a brand-new design almost made from scratch. The same is true for the Execution Scheduler, which the brand has rebuilt from the ground up. In other words, Zen 6 could be as big of a jump as the first to second-gen Zen.
Other rumours claim that the flagship models could feature 128 Gen 5 PCIe lanes alongside 64 Gen 6 PCIe lanes, with support for 16 DDR5-6400 channels. To be clear, we are not talking about desktop chips here, these are server-tier products with 128 or 256 cores.
Before going too far into speculation, we must first wait for Zen 5 to show its worth. We should see these in a couple of weeks at Computex.