AMD has unveiled technical specifications for its next-generation EPYC Venice server processors, which utilize the Zen 6 and Zen 6c architectures. The flagship EPYC 9996 model features 256 cores and 512 threads, supporting 16-channel DDR5 memory, MRDIMM up to 12,800 MT/s, PCIe Gen 6, and CXL 3.1.
According to AMD, the 256-core EPYC 9996 delivers 2.37 times the performance of the 128-core Intel Xeon 6980P and 2.24 times that of the 88-core Nvidia Vera in SPEC CPU 2026 Integer Rate tests. The company also reports a 78% performance increase for the EPYC 9996 compared to the previous 192-core EPYC 9965.
The testing methodology involved varying power configurations, with the 256-core and 96-core Venice models set at 600W, while a high-frequency 96-core variant is capped at 500W. AMD noted that comparisons with Nvidia Vera involved different GCC compiler versions, specifically GCC 16.1 for AMD and GCC 15.2 for Nvidia, which may impact results.
AMD also highlighted performance metrics in cloud workloads, including database, Java, and cryptography tasks, using AWS Graviton5 instances for comparison. Additionally, the company presented data on Agentic AI workloads, utilizing benchmarks such as NGINX, TPCx-AI Kit, FAISS, TPC-H, and TPC-C, though some of these were internally constructed by AMD.
