A pair of engineering samples have been found in the public database of the MilkyWay@home project, which is using distributed computing to create a model of our galaxy. They both ran the application for a few days in late December. The pair identified themselves as being in “Family 25,” which is how we know they’re based on the Zen 4 architecture. One of their OPNs ended in “665” while the other ended in “666,” indicating they’re adjacent to each other in the line-up. That’s interesting because one of them had 8 cores and the other had 16, so there might not be a 12-core model.
MilkyWay@home recorded some performance numbers, but as is often the case with engineering samples, they were nonsensical. The database entries also revealed that they have 1024 KB of L2 cache per core, up from the 512 KB used by all the preceding Zen architectures. Beyond that, though, the entries didn’t say much else about the processors. Amusingly, they were both paired with an Nvidia RTX 2080, which suggests that they’re in the hands of an OEM, not AMD themselves. That lines up with AMD’s plan to release them in the second half of the year. In the meantime, there’ll be a lot more leaks as OEMs test their AM5 motherboards, DDR5 memory, and PCIe 5.0 devices with the new processors. Image credit: Unervi González
