AMD's Zen 6 EPYC chips ship with up to 2x performance boost over Zen 5

AMD has begun shipping its first Zen 6-based processors, the EPYC 9006 "Venice" series, which independent tests show are up to twice as fast as the previous Zen 5 generation in certain workloads. The new chips, built on TSMC's 2nm process, feature up to 12 cores per CCD with a 27% IPC improvement, while the Zen 6c variant doubles core density to 32 per chiplet. In Tom's Hardware benchmarks, the 512-thread EPYC 9996 outperformed its predecessor by 93% in integer tests, and the EPYC 9686F beat Nvidia's Vera by 40% in floating-point workloads. The platform introduces 16-channel memory support, PCIe 6.0, and the MEXT technology that uses AI to offload memory pages to flash storage, potentially cutting DRAM costs by half while retaining 95% performance.