AMD EPYC 9996 Benchmarks Show Unparalleled Performance With 256 Zen 6C Cores
Back in July AMD announced the EPYC 9006 "Venice" series at their Advancing AI event. Today they are announcing EPYC 9006 series Socket SP7 processor availability and with systems beginning to ship today from their OEM/ODM partners. With that we are also now allowed to begin sharing AMD EPYC 9006 performance benchmark figures. Back in July I expected EPYC 9006 to be a "grand slam" for…
AMD unveiled its EPYC 9006 Venice series at their Advancing AI event in July, and now they are making the Socket SP7 processor available for purchase. The benchmarks for the AMD EPYC 9006 series have shown unparalleled performance, with up to 256 Zen 6C cores per socket. The dual-socket configuration tested on the AMD Nigeria server boasts a combined 512 cores and 1024 threads.
These Zen 6C cores operate at a base clock of 2.55GHz and a boost clock of up to 4.1GHz, with 1024MB of L3 cache. The EPYC 9996 has a default power rating of 600 Watts, but it can be configured down to 400 Watts. With 96 PCIe 6.0 lanes and support for DDR5 RDIMMs or MRDIMMs, the 1KU unit costs $14,904 USD. The EPYC 9006 series is currently available, while the SP8 and XSP7 configurations will be released in H1 2027 and H2 2027, respectively.
Comparatively, the EPYC 9996 is significantly ahead of Intel's Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids for HPC workloads, offering 2.2x performance and up to 3.2x performance in certain areas. The benchmarks highlight the EPYC Venice's incredible memory bandwidth capabilities, with up to 16 channels of DDR5-8000 or MRDIMM-12800.
Written by urgent.news from Phoronix's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
