Zen 5 hasn’t launched yet, but we know it will happen between the third and fourth quarter of this year, and that AMD has been around for a while in the Zen 6 concept stage, which will be his generational successor. There is an explanation for this, and that is that the Sunnyvale giant is connecting the development cycles of different generations to make the best use of time.

As you can imagine, the information we have about Zen 6 is scarce, and it’s quite logical, since even AMD hasn’t defined the final design. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have any details about this new generation. Early rumors point to some important keys that indicate big changes in this new architecture, and that could mean important change.

The first key change would be the use of TSMC’s new 2nm node, which will allow significant improvements in transistor density and efficiency. I wonder how AMD will handle this they dissipate heat in CPU chips with such high density and such a small knot, a problem that already caused a debate with Zen 4 and for which AMD had to use a gold alloy in the CPU chips to improve heat dissipation.

Zen 6 could be as big a change as Zen 2 was

And not only in terms of performance, but also on an architectural level. The Zen 2 saw a jump to a chiplet design with all I/O elements also externalized on a connected chiplet, and the CPI improved by 18% compared to the Zen. (15% compared to Zen+).

Zen 6 will be divided into three different rangesstandard series, classic dense, which would be equivalent to EPYC and Threadripper with normal cores, which have a full L3 cache and a dense client that can choose to use Zen 6c cores to increase the parallelization capacity of the device to a greater extent, that is, it should more cores.

As for the most important changes at the architectural level, Zen 6 is said to use a brand new memory controller, and it execution scheduler It has also been redesigned almost from the ground up. In general, this new architecture will represent a major evolution, which could translate into a significant improvement in performance compared to Zen 5.

In theory, Zen 6 will be AMD’s latest architecture Compatible with AM5 socket motherboardsso it closes an important cycle and leaves the door open for the introduction of a new socket and a new generation of motherboards, which, if there are no surprises, should continue with the current nomenclature and therefore be called AM6.