Nevermind the fact that the overwhelming majority of consumer desktop tasks don’t really scale past four to six cores—fanboys have accused AMD of “stagnating” much as Intel did in years past, by having its top-end Ryzen desktop CPUs max out at sixteen cores for four successive generations. That period may be over soon, though, at least if regular leaker zhangzhonghao over at ChipHell has good info.
Click or tap this if you can’t read it.
The leaker dropped a typically cryptic post that another forum user then decoded. The meaning appears to be this: Zen 6 CCDs—that’s the chiplets that hold the CPU cores and are used in both Ryzen and EPYC processors—will come with twelve cores and 48 MB of L3 cache, as previously rumored. That means that a dual-chiplet processor, like the Ryzen 9 9950X, will have 24 cores and 96MB of L3 cache.
Meanwhile, if the leakers are correct, a Zen 6c CCD could have a full 16 cores, just like Zen 5c, but double the L3 cache for a full 64MB. This is notable because it raises the high-density Zen 6c CPUs to the same L3 cache per core as the standard-density Zen 6. Here’s a handy-dandy chart if you’re confused:
Zen 6 and Zen 6c information based on preliminary leaks.
These details are interesting because the CCDs will be used across both Ryzen and EPYC family processors. While AMD has never mixed standard-density and high-density (“C”) cores on a chiplet processor, there’s no particular reason that couldn’t happen. The ChipHell posters give the impression that AMD will ship a desktop Ryzen CPU with dual Zen 6C CCDs for a whopping 32 cores and 128MB of L3, but we haven’t seen any indication that will happen.
There’s another interpretation of zhangzhonghao’s posts, though, and that one claims a single Zen 6C CCD will in fact pack 32 cores and 64MB of L3 cache. This is a fascinating idea, and many early leaks of the Zen 5c design used in EPYC “Turin” processors claimed that those CPUs would have 32-core CCDs with two 16-core CCXes per chiplet. That did not turn out to be the case, but given that Zen 6/c are expected to come along with a die shrink, it’s certainly possible.
Processors based on the Zen 6 “Medusa” core design are expected to show up next year, so this is all pretty early speculation in any case.