AMD Zen 6 Discussion

moinmoin said:
They have an office in Taiwan, but not in China, so I'd guess the former.
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Could be Vietnam or India. In any case they're probably getting hardware from some of the same industrial districts as GMK.
 
Any news on the chip interconnect used for Zen 6 on desktop? Are we getting the rumored more advanced packaging?
 
One of the latest rumor theories is that AMD is waiting for Intel's refresh launch/announcements to finish and then they might start giving some updates.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
One of the latest rumor theories is that AMD is waiting for Intel's refresh launch/announcements to finish and then they might start giving some updates.
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I'm not sure about that. Both AMD and Intel follow fairly consistent schedules for releasing chipperies, so I'm not expecting much from a surprise perspective -

Intel - Typically launches a new -S* generation end of Q3/beginning of Q4 with 3-4 -K processors, then fill in the rest of that generation/socket with lower power stuff around CES. Then for Computex, new mobile chips.

AMD - Zen has been launching a new generation about every 2 years, mostly around Computex time (for the main 4 or so X varieties) for the announcement with availability in Q3. X3D chips have been following 6-12 months after. Then the rest of the family is filled out over time with lower wattage chips.

So what does that mean I expect based on history? Intel will likely launch an Arrow Lake-S Refresh soon and Zen 6 will be announced at Computex 2026 with availability in Q3 2026. If AMD really wanted to pull it forward, we might see something at CES 2026, but I also doubt it.

* -S being the desktop class CPUs for a particular code name, most recently, Arrow Lake-S, aka, Core Ultra 285K, et. al.
 
As far as clockspeeds I would be very surprised if Zen 6 will sustain 6GHz under load (like 8 or 10 cores loaded up) much less 7GHz. Not that I'm not hoping for it, but 6GHz has been a "speed barrier" for quite some time. Intel broke it briefly with Raptor Lake only to have degradation issues.
 
Hulk said:
As far as clockspeeds I would be very surprised if Zen 6 will sustain 6GHz under load (like 8 or 10 cores loaded up) much less 7GHz. Not that I'm not hoping for it, but 6GHz has been a "speed barrier" for quite some time
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6GHz is more or less 'right there'; it really seems that AMD and Intel have other fish to fry before doing the engineering to make that possible, because small bumps in clockspeed are fairly meaningless now. Might actually be detrimental if they make sacrifices to get there i.e. adding pipeline stages a la Netburst.

Hulk said:
Intel broke it briefly with Raptor Lake only to have degradation issues.
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Well, the P-cores could handle that and more, no question. They're stout. Raptor Lake's problem seemed to be rather the bus that shared its voltage plane with the CPU cores, so that when a P-core or two would jump up in clockspeed and require a burst of juice, even while the rest of the CPU was using much less power, that bus could be damaged. And once that degradation hit a tipping point it was game over unfortunately.

But Intel could absolutely build a solid 6+GHz part too, if that were a design goal.


I'd say that it'd be easier for Intel to push clockspeeds than AMD, given currently released products, but realistically either could do a 7GHz SKU if that was an engineering goal they wanted to hit.

The bigger question is whether it'd make a difference vs. putting their resources into increases in IPC or reducing latency instead.
 
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