While AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” launched just under two years ago, it has aged remarkably well. It is one of the few CPU generations in my past 22 years of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking that has still captivated me two years on in finding still typically industry-leading performance across varying workloads, exceptional reliability, and all around a very robust platform. Today though at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su formally announced EPYC 9006 “Venice” for taking their server offerings to the next level in the agentic AI era.
Part of what made AMD EPYC 9005 rather timeless is that it has performed incredibly well against the competition. Even for more recent CPUs like NVIDIA Vera or EPYC Turin outperforming Amazon’s new Graviton5, Turin has aged superb. Yet here we are with EPYC Venice in production.
Against Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids, the advantage with Intel has been MRDIMMs for greater memory bandwidth in memory intensive workloads over DDR5-6400 (albeit with greater power and cost) or workloads prepared to make use of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). With EPYC Venice, AMD is now supporting Gen2 MRDIMM-12800 memory as well as DDR5-8000 memory. That right there eliminates Granite Rapid’s advantage with just leaving AMX for select AI workloads as a unique trait. While AMD EPYC 9006 series does not support AMX, Venice does improve AMD’s AVX-512 support with AVX-512 BMM. That will be interesting to benchmark the AVX-512 BMM impact in future articles on Phoronix with up-to-date compilers.
Beyond DDR5-8000 and MRDIMM-12800 MT/s speeds, EPYC Venice supports up to 16 channel memory per socket. Given EPYC 9005 Turin’s performance advantage overall, pair that with around 20% more performance per core for a total knockout. Even for workloads like Nginx HTTPS web serving, AMD demonstrated 1.2x gen-on-gen performance. And with Zen 6C up to 256 cores / 512 threads per socket.
AMD EPYC 9006 Venice also supports PCIe Gen 6 with up to 160 lanes in a dual socket configuration. There are also new power management features with Venice like FAST, UBPS, and UPP that will be fun to test and evaluate. EPYC Venice clock frequencies will top out at 5.0GHz for the 96 core processor.
Venice is made up of EPYC 9006 SP7 processors, EPYC 9006 SP8 for more optimized server value, and EPYC 9006X SP7 for the Venice-X 3D V-Cache processors that will debut in 2027. AMD EPYC 9006 LP “Verano” is also on the way for EPYC Zen 6 with LPDDR memory in the second half of 2027.
While “announced” today, during the embargoed briefings in San Francisco, no EPYC 9006 SKU tables or the like were shared and EPYC 9006 SP7 won’t be available until Q4. So for some it will be viewed as more of a soft launch. But considering how strong EPYC 9005 series is performing, even if AMD’s claims are only half-way met, which would be unusual, it would still come out as industry leading given the current strong performance out of EPYC 9005.
Benchmarks of AMD EPYC 9006 Venice will be happening on Phoronix soon. And unlike all of the hand-holding, selected benchmark restrictions, and preventing of power/frequency reporting as recently noted with NVIDIA Vera, there will not be any such restrictions with EPYC Venice. AMD is committed to fairly show they can deliver in today’s diverse agentic AI era and even with more traditional Linux server workloads, HPC, etc.
From the numbers presented by AMD of EPYC Venice, the processor is delivering decisive wins over the Intel Xeon and ARM server CPU competition, which even if interpreted rather conservatively on the side of caution should still be very strong and excellent shape considering the current dominating position with EPYC 9005 Turin. Furthermore, Intel’s competition with Xeon Diamond Rapids isn’t coming out until at least 2027. Very interesting times ahead in the Linux server space.
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