AMD has presented its updated CPU roadmap during the Financial Analyst Day 2025, confirming the Zen 6 and Zen 7 architectures powering upcoming Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc products. The company plans to launch its Zen 6-based products next year, with Zen 7 following later with further enhancements to AI acceleration. Colour me interested.
Starting with Zen 6, the architecture will once more feature two design variants – Zen 6 for high performance and Zen 6c for power efficiency. The latter should find a home on battery-powered devices such as laptops and handhelds, likely in hybrid Zen 6 + Zen 6c designs, and most importantly, in data centre and edge deployments where high-density and power-efficiency are paramount.
AMD has indicated that Zen 6 will be the first in the industry to leverage TSMC’s flagship 2nm process node, potentially giving it an edge over the competition. The company’s CTO, Mark Papermaster, also highlighted how both Zen 6 and Zen 6c will boast higher performance alongside more AI features. Understandably, these IPC gains include server Epyc ‘Venice’, desktop Ryzen ‘Olympic Ridge’, and mobile Ryzen ‘Medusa Point’ chips. The brand’s Helios server-rack solutions will also be powered by Zen 6 CPUs, alongside next-gen CDNA 5 GPUs and 5th gen Infinity Fabric and PCIe 6.0.
Lastly, Zen 6 is set to bring additional AI pipelines to expand and improve AI data type support, in addition to several new instruction sets such as AVX512 FP16 and AVX VNNI INT8. The former is targeting ML workloads that use FP16 operations, while the latter accelerates int8 inference. This should allow for more efficient ML acceleration without needing dedicated/addon chips.
Next, we have Zen 7, which is being confirmed for the first time by AMD, listed as a ‘Next-Generation’ product made using ‘Future Node.’ Though the company didn’t share a lot of details about Zen 7, it indicated that the architecture boasts a new matrix engine and supports more AI data formats. AMD seems focused on pushing the AI capabilities of its CPUs to share the load with GPUs and dedicated accelerators. This could be very useful for consumer hardware which lacks such accelerators.
While AMD remains tight-lipped regarding specs, recent leaks claim that Zen 7 will be available in two main designs, one keeping the same 8 cores per CCD as Zen 5 and another offering up to 16 cores per CCD, for a total of 32 cores per desktop CPU. The latter variant is said to also boast 448MB of cache using a 160MB 3D V-Cache layer. If correct, Zen 7 will represent a major bump in multi-threaded performance, estimated to be up to 150% higher than Zen 5.
Currently, Zen 7 is rumoured to target late 2027 or early 2028, starting with server Epyc processors. Some even claim that Zen 7 will be compatible with the current AM5 platform. An exciting prospect, if true.
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