AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster recently officially confirmed that the company's first Zen 6 architecture-based server processor EPYC "Venice" will be officially released at the "Advancing AI" event to be held from July 22 to 23. In a recent interview, Papermaster introduced the processor in detail and emphasized that it is deeply optimized to meet the needs of traditional x86 enterprise-class workloads.
He pointed out that despite the rapid technological evolution of the industry, enterprise customers are still highly dependent on the mature x86 architecture ecosystem and have no plans to abandon this technology route.
As the industry's first high-performance computing processor manufactured using TSMC's 2nm process, the production of EPYC "Venice" marks a new milestone in the processor manufacturing process. Currently, the manufacturing of this product is progressing steadily in Taiwan, and in accordance with the plan announced by AMD in May this year, TSMC's Arizona factory will take over part of the production capacity. In terms of specifications, the flagship "Venice" processor will have up to 256 Zen 6 cores, achieving a 33% performance improvement over the 192-core configuration of the current EPYC "Turin" series. AMD said that compared with the previous generation of products based on the Zen 5 architecture, the performance and energy efficiency of the new generation processor have improved by more than 70%.
At the platform architecture level, "Venice" introduces a new SP7 slot that supports 16-channel memory and a memory bandwidth of up to 1.6 TB/s. At the same time, the platform has also been upgraded to the PCIe Gen 6 standard, which significantly optimizes the data transmission efficiency between the CPU and GPU, which is particularly critical for "Venice" when processing AI acceleration tasks and traditional enterprise-level tasks. When deployed in Helios rack systems, these processors will be paired with AMD's new Instinct MI455 GPU.
For desktop and mobile Zen 6 architecture products that consumers are concerned about, they are still in the independent planning stage. Although there are a lot of rumors about the confirmed Ryzen Threadripper TR6, Ryzen 10000 series "Olympic Ridge" and "Medusa Point" APUs using the "Mustang Peak" architecture, these consumer products are not expected to appear until the end of this year at the earliest, and the most likely official release window is during the CES Consumer Electronics Show in January 2027.