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 performance... After hands-on with the 6th Gen EPYC processors, it's a grand slam alright -- out of this world. Today marks the actual hardware availability of AMD EPYC 9006 SP7 hardware following the soft announcement this summer of the entire EPYC 9006 line-up. Back during the summer announcement was coverage of the different series and key features while today's article has much more details on Zen 6 as well as the SKU table. EPYC 9006 SP7 is available now while the EPYC 9006 SP8 is coming in H1'2027 and the EPYC 9006X SP7 and EPYC 9006LP Verano CPUs are coming in H2'2027. AMD during their briefings talked up Venice as delivering 2.2x the performance of Intel's Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids competition for HPC workloads and up to 3.2x in areas like NAMD. Over prior generation EPYC 9005 "Turin", AMD is highlighting 2x the integer compute, 2.4x the floating-point compute, 2.7x the memory bandwidth, 1.4x the HPC compute, and 1.3x the matrix compute. The Zen 6 ISA capabilities shouldn't come as a surprise given the Znver6 support already present in GCC and LLVM/Clang along with other Linux kernel patches and the like exposing some of the other Zen 6 features. Venice with up to 16 channels of DDR5-8000 or MRDIMM-12800 can make for some crazy performance in memory bandwidth bound workloads. But enough with the marketing slides... You come to Phoronix to see independent benchmarks. So let's begin with looking at the AMD EPYC 9006 series performance and power efficiency in our own tests and across hundreds of different benchmarks. In this article is a look at the EPYC 9996 2P performance. With 256 cores / 512 threads per socket, the dual socket configuration tested on the AMD Nigeria server is a combined 512 cores / 1024 threads. The 256 cores are Zen 6C and feature a 2.55GHz base clock and up to a 4.1GHz boost clock and 1024MB of L3 cache. The EPYC 9996 has a default power rating of 600 Watts but is configurable down to 400 Watts if desired. The processor supports 96 lanes of PCIe 6.0 and either DDR5 RDIMMs or MRDIMMs with all 16 memory channels available. The 1KU unit pricing is $14,904 USD for this flagship processor. Also out today are EPYC 9686F benchmarks too. Given that some benchmarks/workloads don't scale well up through 1,024 and somewhat different scope between the 256-core Zen 6C and 96-core high frequency Zen 6 cores, the different articles and focus. For comparison to the new EPYC 9996 flagship, the processors tested for this article included the EPYC 9575F 2P as the prior-generation Turin HF flagship part, the EPYC 9755 2P as the 128 core flagship Zen 5 server processor configuration, and the EPYC 9965 2P 192 core Zen 5C server flagship processor. On the Intel side was the Intel Xeon 6980P 2P flagship configuration. Based on the time I had available for re-testing existing server processors, etc. More benchmarks of other existing CPU comparisons will come in follow-up articles as well as seeing how EPYC Venice compares to my prior NVIDIA Vera benchmarks. AMD EPYC Venice should work fine on any modern Linux distributions like Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and the latest RHEL10 updates. For this review I used Ubuntu 26.10 tested across all the CPUs being compared for having a very fresh and up-to-date experience with Linux 7.3 and other software updates. Thanks to AMD for providing the Venice CPUs and reference server for ongoing Linux hardware benchmarking and reviews at Phoronix. Now let's see what this 256 core processor is capable of accomplishing both for performance and performance-per-Watt.