AMD launches Epyc 9006 server processors built on Zen 6
The flagship Epyc 9996 offers 256 cores and 512 threads, with a listed price of US$14,904.
AMD is shipping its first server processors based on Zen 6, the Epyc 9006 family codenamed Venice. Systems using SP7 are arriving ahead of SP8 models, which are due in the first half of 2027. AMD is promoting the processors primarily for AI workloads.
At the top of the range, AMD lists the Epyc 9996 with a 2.55GHz base frequency, a boost clock of up to 4.1GHz and 1GB of L3 cache. Its default power level is 600W, configurable down to 400W. The least expensive model, the Epyc 9016, costs US$700 and has eight cores supporting 16 threads.
AMD attributes an improvement of up to 2.6x in performance per watt to the move to TSMC’s N2 process. In the company’s own benchmarks, the 9996 delivered at least double the performance of Intel’s Xeon 6980P on some tasks and more than triple on others. Separately, Tom’s Hardware found a server equipped with two 9996 chips outperformed a dual Epyc 9965 system by up to 93% in the SPEC CPU 2026 intrate test.
High-frequency host-node models offer boost speeds reaching 5.3GHz. AMD also lists memory bandwidth of up to 1.6 TB/s per socket and says PCIe 6.0 doubles the I/O bandwidth linking CPUs and GPUs.
