The new AMD EPYC 9006 Venice server processors, based on the Zen 6 architecture, feature up to 256 cores per socket. In a dual-socket configuration, this allows for a total of 512 physical cores. Recent testing explored whether Simultaneous Multithreading remains effective for these high-density chips.
Benchmarks were conducted on the 256-core EPYC 9996 and the 96-core EPYC 9686F processors. The tests compared performance and power efficiency with SMT enabled by default versus SMT disabled. The analysis included dual-socket setups, reaching up to 512 physical cores.
The evaluation utilized a range of workloads, some of which scaled up to approximately 1024 threads for the dual-socket EPYC 9996 configuration. Other applications faced hard limits ranging from 64 to 512 threads during the testing process.
The testing environment was based on the Ubuntu 26.10 operating system running on the Linux 7.3 kernel. The results indicate that SMT on the Zen 6 architecture continues to provide measurable benefits in both raw performance and power efficiency.
