AMD launches Zen 6 EPYC CPUs and MI455X GPU
AMD introduced its Zen 6 architecture through the EPYC 9006 server CPU family, alongside the Instinct MI400 GPU line and Helios rack-scale AI system. The EPYC 9006 processors span variants from 8 to 256 CPU cores, with options for 3D V-Cache, up to 1152 MB of L3 cache in a single socket, and at least one LPDDR5X-based version aimed at rack-scale AI host nodes.
The main EPYC 9006 SP7 chips scale to 256 cores per socket and up to 5 GHz, while HF models reach up to 96 regular Zen 6 cores. AMD says the new processors deliver as much as 70% increased performance over the prior generation and beat Intel’s 128-core Xeon 6980P CPU by as much as 245% in Agentic AI workloads, though third-party benchmarks have not yet validated those claims.
On GPUs, AMD detailed the Instinct MI455X, a CDNA 5 accelerator with 432GB of HBM4, 23.3 TB/second of memory bandwidth, and over 20 PFLOPs of MXFP8 performance. The Helios rack combines 72 GPUs into a unified system with 31TB of total HBM4 memory, 1.7 PB/s of total HBM4 bandwidth, and 2.9 EFLOPS of AI compute.