No fewer than four Zen 6 processors are already in the works, but none are intended for consumers.
The first rumors and whispers about Zen 6 aren’t exactly new. For several months now, numerous sources—some more reliable than others—have been reporting on the imminent arrival of this new architecture, which is expected to help AMD further widen the gap with its longtime rival, Intel. These rumors were corroborated by a very official announcement made by Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer at AMD, during a brief interview: AMD was set to unveil the first Zen 6 processors at its “Advancing AI 2026” event, held on July 22 and 23 in San Francisco.
The event has come and gone, and AMD kept its promise, even if the announcements in question might disappoint some users. Indeed, while Zen 6 was officially unveiled and new processors were presented, AMD reserved its announcements for the enterprise market: no new Ryzen processors for now. During Advancing AI 2026, the spotlight was on EPYC processors—processors designed for the enterprise market, but still quite interesting nonetheless. First, AMD confirmed its strategy: a single processor cannot cover all use cases, so the U.S. company is preparing to launch four variants of these EPYC Zen 6 processors, known by the codename EPYC Venice.
The EPYC 9006 SP7 and EPYC 9006 SP8 will be the first two variants to become available; they are expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2026. The SP7 will be the more powerful of the two, with up to 256 cores, while the SP8 will be limited to 128 cores. AMD will partner with TSMC for this project, which will handle the production of the 2-nm chips—a prerequisite for achieving 256 cores, as well as a maximum frequency of 5 GHz across 96 cores and a TDP of 600 watts. In addition to these two chips, AMD plans, a few weeks or months later, to launch the EPYC 9006X with an oversized L3 cache (up to 1,152 MB) and the EPYC 9006LP paired with LPDDR5X memory for improved energy efficiency.
To top it off, AMD also announces support for up to 16 memory channels, delivering a maximum bandwidth of 1.6 TB/s. DDR5-8000 will be included, as well as the new MRDIMM, rated for up to 12,800 MT/s. With these specifications, the Zen 6-based EPYC Venice processors should be able to significantly outperform the previous generation of EPYC Turin processors, which were already far superior to Intel’s top processors. In this sense, the arrival of the EPYC Venice processors is good news for us, everyday users: if Zen 6 delivers on its promises in the server segment, there’s a good chance it will do the same for the future Ryzen Zen 6 processors that AMD is planning for 2027. So, stay tuned…
