AMD VP and chief Zen architect rebuke claims that Nvidia and Arm made CPUs for agentic AI — ‘We didn’t magically know four years ago that agentic was going to be a thing’
AMD debuts Helion reference design for agentic AI servers with up to 32,768 Zen 6 ‘Venice’ cores
We had a chance to test the EPYC 9686F along with the dense EPYC 9996, which you can read more about in our Zen 6 EPYC Venice deep dive and benchmarking article. And indeed, the EPYC 9686F looks very impressive in some of the HPC workloads we ran.
We were only able to test a 2P configuration, and as evidenced by the sole Xeon 6980P, CloverLeaf is sensitive to latency. Even then, the 2P EPYC 9686F completed the complex hydrodynamics simulation in about a third of the time as a single Xeon 6980P.
AMD says it's currently using MEXT, its AI-driven flash-as-DRAM technology, to bolster the amount of memory available for its EDA workloads. When it deploys Venice-X, Steinke says the company will continue using MEXT, which you can read more about in our recent MEXT breakdown on Tom's Hardware Premium .
Venice-X CPUs are launching in the second half of 2027, while SP7 and SP8 Venice CPUs are rolling out now. Also coming in the second half of next year is AMD's Verano, which it's pitching as an AI host node that leverages SOCAMM2 LPDDR5X memory.
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Jake Roach Social Links Navigation Senior Analyst, CPUs Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom’s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors.
MobileJAD Getting some new products from AMD is nice, but it will be nicer when prices for regular CPUs and GPUs could come down to a more affordable level… Reply
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