AMD officially confirms fresh next-gen Zen 6 CPU details
34 comments
·December 19, 2025magicalhippo
FootballMuse
Reportedly, Zen 7 will also be on AM5.
https://overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd-extends-am5-l...
Pet_Ant
Higher DRAM prices might mean that there is less demand from new system builders mean depressed prices so it might be more tempting to upgrade your existing AM5 CPU to Zen 6
Ritewut
I would figure the opposite. There are plenty of people like me staying on AM4 because of the RAM price increases. I will probably skip AM5 entirely.
Pet_Ant
But they are still gonna fab the Zen 6 chips. So for people already with AM5 motherboards populated with RAM but rocking a Zen 4 CPU this could be a good time to upgrade that CPU with your existing setup. You passing this generation just means less competition for those CPUs which should make them even cheaper.
0cf8612b2e1e
I am a hypocrite, but there is really not that much need to upgrade CPUs anymore. Even a ten year old chip seems completely adequate for day to day use. I played with a N100 recently and those things are incredibly capable.
(Ignore my AM5 workstation with 192GB RAM in the corner)
PunchyHamster
and do what, buy now-hideously expensive DDR6?
parineum
> less demand from new system builders mean depressed prices
Only if they overestimate demand and overproduce CPUs. Otherwise it will lead to higher prices because there's less economy of scale.
bikelang
I’m sure there are a plethora of technical reasons it’s impractical - but my dream is a big, unified L3 cache across their CCD chiplets. Maybe 256mb in size for the x950 x3d chips.
hedgehog
There are challenges with really big monolithic caches. IBM does something sort of like your idea in their Power and Telum chips, with different approaches. Power has a non-uniform cache within each die, Telum has a way to stitch together cache even across sockets (!).
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/telum-ii-at-hot-chips-2024-main...
https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~moshovos/ACA07/projectsuggesti...
(if you do ML things you might recognize Doug Burger's name on the authors line of the second one)
wmf
They could bond multiple CCDs on top of a single large unified L3 die (similar to MI300C) if they wanted to. I've seen no rumors about that though.
guywithahat
I'm currently cache limited by my work and I share your dream
TwoNineA
I hope for a little more PCIe lanes so I can run 2 gaming VMs on these and upgrade my old Threadripper.
toast0
You're not getting more lanes without a new socket. Or a PCIe switch, which is expensive.
dogma1138
There is fuck all difference between x8 and x16 for gaming. Heck with PCIe5 even dropping to x4 is borderline noticeable outside of benchmarks.
Sohcahtoa82
100% this
The PCI-Express bus is actually rather slow. Only ~63 GB/s, even with PCIe 5 x16!
PCIe is simply not a bottleneck for gaming. All the textures and models are loaded into the GPU once, when the game loads, then re-used from VRAM for every frame. Otherwise, a scene with a lowly 2 GB of assets would cap out at only ~30 fps.
Which is funny to think about historically. I remember when AGP first came out, and it was advertised as making it so GPUs wouldn't need tons of memory, only enough for the frame buffers, and that they would stream texture data across AGP. Well, the demands for bandwidth couldn't keep up. And now, even if the port itself was fast enough, the system RAM wouldn't be. DDR5-6400 running in dual-channel mode is only ~102 GB/s. On the flip side the RTX 5050, a current-gen budget card, has over 3x that at 320 GB/s, and on the top end, the RTX 5090 is 1.8 TB/s.
Gracana
Your comment is basically the "tl;dr" of this Techpowerup article (which is great and people should read it if they are unconvinced or curious): https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-p...
johnbellone
The biggest difference for me for PCIe 5.0 has been additional bandwidth for my M2 drive.
kijin
Faster M.2 drives are great, but you know what would be even greater? More M.2 drives.
I wish it was possible to put several M.2 drives in a system and RAID them all up, like you can with SATA drives on any above-average motherboard. Even a single lane of PCIe 5.0 would be more than enough for each of those drives, because each drive won't need to work as hard. Less overheating, more redundancy, and cheaper than getting a small number of super fast high capacity drives. Alas, most mobos only seem to hand out lanes in multiples of 4.
Szpadel
for that you need new socket and motherboard. you need to physically route those extra lanes to pcie slots or other components
wtallis
And even when AMD does move their mainstream desktop processors to a new socket, there's very little reason to expect them to be trying to accommodate multi-GPU setups. SLI and Crossfire are dead, multi-GPU gaming isn't coming back for the foreseeable future, so multi-GPU is more or less a purely workstation/server feature at this point. They're not going to increase the cost of their mainstream platform for the sole purpose of cannibalizing Threadripper sales.
pmontra
"7 GHz clock speed"
When did the GHz race start again?
muro
Rumors = the author just made something up
ziml77
Similarly:
Leaks = the author just made something up, but now it ranks extra highly when someone searches for "[upcoming thing] leaks"
Sohcahtoa82
I hate the term "leak". It used to have meaning.
Now, it's either a fancy term for "announcement", or people use it synonymously with "rumor".
bikelang
I remain quite skeptical of that. Maybe on a purpose built overclocking rig :^)
Will be interesting to see how long this RAM insanity will last. If it doesn't calm down before Zen 6 releases, people like me on older platforms might just have to skip Zen 6 entirely and wait for the AM6 platform.