AMD has officially detailed its Zen 6 CPU family, codenamed Venice, featuring the flagship EPYC 9996 with 256 cores and 512 threads. Chief architect Mike Clark and VP Madhu Rangarajan confirmed development began in 2022, leading to the new EPYC 9006 lineup.
The roadmap includes the frequency-optimized EPYC 9686F and two major 2027 releases. The Venice-X range will target HPC markets with 3D-stack cache, while the Verano range introduces an LPDDR5X memory system to optimize performance for modern data center needs.
As Nvidia and Arm debut Vera and AGI chips for agentic AI, AMD positions Venice to handle similar workflows. These tasks require executing Python and Rust functions, making the high core counts and memory innovations of Zen 6 critical for future AI scaling.