AMD Zen 6 EPYC Venice Posts Up to 93% Gains as IPC Rises 27%
Updated
Updated · Tom's Hardware · Nov 10
AMD Zen 6 EPYC Venice Posts Up to 93% Gains as IPC Rises 27%
3 articles · Updated · Tom's Hardware · Nov 10
Summary
Dual-socket EPYC 9996 systems scored 93% higher than last-generation EPYC 9965 servers in SPEC CPU 2026 intrate tests, while the 96-core 9686F beat Nvidia’s Vera by 17% in the same benchmark.
AMD ties the jump to Zen 6’s 27% average IPC uplift in enterprise, cloud and AI workloads, plus denser chiplets, a redesigned vector engine, dual I/O dies and 16 memory channels on SP7.
The 256-core 9996 targets maximum throughput with 1,024 threads in 2P setups, while the 9686F’s 5 GHz boost helped it open wider leads in floating-point, Python, Java and HPC workloads.
Memory results were more mixed: Venice led Vera by 11% to 19% in STREAM under one binding policy, but Vera still won some larger-array bandwidth tests.
The benchmarks add third-party context to AMD’s Venice launch earlier Tuesday, when it began shipping 6th Gen EPYC chips with up to 256 cores, PCIe 6.0 and 12.8 GT/s MRDIMM support.