We’ve known for some time now that AMD was planning on launching next-gen Zen 6 CPUs in 2026, but hardware has been in a weird place for a while, so it’s best not to assume something will be going into your rig / server until it’s in your hands. And yet AMD has confirmed it will begin rolling out the next generation on the 22nd and 23rd of this month, starting with server-focused EPYC processors.
As spotted by Overclock3D, AMD’s Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Mark Papermaster, announced as much at Raise Summit 2026. He said, “What we’ve done at AMD, you know, since we launched the new Zen processor back in 2017, we’re now on our sixth generation. So at our advancing AI event on July 22nd and 23rd, we’re rolling out this new generation.”
AMD’s next-generation EPYC processor, codenamed Venice, is said to give 1.7x performance and efficiency over the last generation and will have a 30% increase in thread density, according to AMD. We’ll have to wait until they get into the wild to see if that matches with real-life testing, though.
Papermast claims it is ‘optimised for standalone x86 traditional workloads’, and given its placement in servers, this makes sense. Venice is built on TSMC’s 2 nm process and is the first AMD CPU to do so. Many previous AMD processors are actually built on the ageing 5 nm process or on 4 nm, so big performance lifts are expected.