AMD has just revealed an updated Zen roadmap for its CPUs at Financial Analyst Day, labeled "Leadership CPU Core Roadmap." While it doesn't delve into details — or even show any new ones — we do get explicit confirmations for a bunch of previously-rumored (albeit obvious) tech. AMD also made Zen 7 official for the first time in a roadmap, teasing a release date beyond 2026. Let's break it all down.
Starting with what's due next: Zen 6. We already knew it was coming next year, which the slide below reinforces, and AMD confirms that Zen 6 will be "industry-first" in leveraging TSCM's flagship 2nm (N2) process nodes. AMD CTO Mark Papermaster highlighted that both Zen 6 and Zen 6C will benefit from IPC improvements, extracting higher performance, while offering more AI features across the Ryzen and EPYC series.
(Image credit: AMD)
Speaking of, the upcoming EPYC "Venice," Ryzen Desktop "Olympic Ridge," and Ryzen Mobile "Medusa Point" chips will be built on the Zen 6 architecture, with more lineups to follow. AMD's Helios server-rack solutions will also be powered by Zen 6's EPYC Venice, paired with CDNA 5 GPUs using 5th gen Infinity Fabric with 224 GB/s of bandwidth.
Next up is Zen 7, still a couple of years away and fabricated on what AMD's calling a "Future Node." This is AMD's true next-gen product, implying a major shakeup is inbound. Zen 7 will debut a "New Matrix Engine" with even more AI functionality, but that's where the details stop — core configs, cache layout, and so on are at the mercy of leaks.
Current speculation puts Zen 7 at somewhere around 2027-2028 with EPYC "Verano" data center CPUs expected to be its first product. The rest of the roadmap is just a retrospective, boasting how far AMD has come since AM5's launch a little over three years ago, going from 5nm to 2nm in just a span of four years. Since Financial Analyst Day is aimed at investors, there was more focus on artificial intelligence ambitions than thorough technical insight.
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