AMD Zen 6 to bring three different variants as company is reportedly finalizing designs in a few months

Moore’s Law is Dead leaked back in September 2023 that the Zen 6 processors, codenamed “Morpheus”, could be utilizing 3 nm and 2 nm process nodes and land in mid to late 2025. The leaker also alleged at the time that AMD would finally give the desktop Ryzen chips a big boost in core counts with Zen 6 potentially bringing up to 32 cores.

The leaker has now shared more details regarding AMD Zen 6 including the three possible variants.

Per MLID, AMD will finalize the design of the Zen 6 products by Q3 2024. However, the leaker thinks that the Zen 6 release date might move to 2026 as Team Red is supposedly unsure “how much of the family will be 2 nm”.

Zen 6 variants

The Zen 6 architecture reportedly has three flavors: Standard, Dense Classic, and Client Dense. The “Standard” Zen 6 variant is, as the name suggests, just the regular desktop variant and it clocks the highest. “Dense Classic” is in the same vein as the Zen 4c and the rumored Zen 5c. 

For folks who are out of the loop, AMD’s Zen 4c cores take up half the space of the normal Zen 4 CPU cores but possess the same underlying architecture. So, unlike Intel’s small E-cores which are essentially a different architecture than the big P-cores, the Zen 4c cores are fundamentally identical to the Zen 4 cores but with less L3 cache and reduced clocks to save space. This dense architecture allows AMD to pack more cores while also reducing energy consumption.

MLID suggests that Zen 6 “Client Dense” takes the Zen Xc formula even further by increasing the core count even further but incurring an energy penalty in the process.

Finally, Zen 6 could have a memory controller with “an almost from scratch redesign” vs Zen 5 as well as a brand new Execution-Scheduler. Interestingly, where Zen 6 was initially supposed to build upon Zen 5, the architecture is reportedly “close to being as big of an undertaking as Zen 2 was”.

Long story short, if MLID’s leak is accurate, Zen 6 is shaping up to be an intriguing follow-up to Zen 5, especially because of core count increases and the Client Dense variant. However, it is still too early to claim anything for certain, as we could be multiple years away from the Zen 6 launch.