NuAxiSemiconductor trade intelligence

AMD EPYC 9996 Geekbench Listing Offers First Look at Zen 6 Single-Core Gains

What happened

An early per-clock comparison of AMD's Zen 6 has surfaced: leaker HXL spotted a Geekbench 7.1.0 listing for the 256-core EPYC 9996, the flagship "Venice" chip AMD launched in July, scoring 2,847 points in single-core on a Dell PowerEdge R9815 server running Linux. User three twenty six on X then locked a Ryzen 7 9700X to 4.1 GHz, matching the EPYC 9996's maximum boost, and got 2,444 points on the same Geekbench version, working out to roughly 16.5% higher single-core performance for Zen 6 at the same frequency. Zen 6 came out ahead in all 15 single-core subtests, with gains ranging from 8.2% in File Compression to 25.7% in HTML5 Browser. Caveats stated in the article: the EPYC 9996 uses the dense Zen 6c cores, not the full Zen 6 cores expected in desktop Ryzen chips; the two systems are wildly different (a server platform versus a 9700X running DDR5-6000 CL34 under CachyOS Linux); and the EPYC listing has since been pulled from the Geekbench database. AMD has confirmed that "Olympic Ridge" desktop CPUs will stay on AM5, though they reportedly won't arrive until 2027. The source does not state the cause.