AMD’s Zen 6 “Medusa” Ryzen CPUs reportedly feature RDNA 5 graphics

AMD’s Zen 6 “Medusa” Ryzen CPUs will feature a major redesign over existing AMD CPUs

AMD’s ready to launch their Zen 5 CPUs later this year, and now, rumours of their successors are starting to emerge. AMD appears to be making major changes with their Zen 6 (codenamed Medusa) Ryzen processors, both in terms of integrated graphics, and in terms of chiplet design.

According to Everest on Twitter/X, AMD ar opting to utilise RDNA 5 integrated graphics with their Zen 6 “Medusa” CPUs. This means that AMD will be skipping RDNA 4 for their mainstream desktop CPUs. Today’s chiplet-based Ryzen desktop CPUs feature RDNA 2 integrated graphics. Shifting to RDNA 5 should deliver AMD’s future Ryzen CPUs a hefty iGPU performance boost.

Other changes that Everest has previously leaked for “Medusa” include changes to AMD’s chiplet CPU designs. AMD are reportedly moving to a 2.5D interconnect for their Zen 6 CPUs. This change will likely increase inter-chip bandwidth and decrease inter-chip latencies. These could result in notable performance increases for AMD’s future CPUs. This could be especially true for future EPYC processors, which feature huge core counts and a lot of inter-chip connections.

Memes aside, Medusa has RDNA 5 iGPU, skipping RDNA 4 https://t.co/NBgY6tUenR

— Everest (@Olrak29_) February 19, 2024

What do these changes mean for AMD’s Zen 6 Medusa processors?

Moving to RDNA 5 should give AMD’s future processors a healthy boost in graphics performance. This could be useful for a lot of workloads, from light gaming to light video editing. Perhaps thes CPUs will support both AV1 encode and decode, or other additions that could give AMD’s future CPUs a productivity boost.

AMD’s new interconnect technology has the potential to have a huge impact on AMD’s CPU designs. A stronger interconnect can give AMD CPUs more interconnect bandwidth and decreased chip-to-chip latencies. Both of these changes have performance implications, and should allow multi-chip CPUs to perform more similarly to equivalent monolithic CPU designs.

If this new interconnect does indeed decrease chip-to-chip latencies, AMD’s Zen 6 CPUs should feature lowered memory latencies. This could have a notable impact on Zen 6’s gaming performance, and any other memory/latency sensitive workload.

On the high-end, AMD’s new interconnect technology could open the door to larger EPYC or Threadripper processors. A faster interconnect could allow AMD to create higher core count CPUs, as more CPU Core Dies will be able to communicate with each other without any bottlenecks.

Even without AMD’s planned Zen 6 architectural changes, it looks like Medusa is going to be an interesting processor launch from AMD. Next-generation chiplet designs and faster integrated graphics are both welcome additions to AMD’s future processors, though it will be a long time before consumers will see the results of these design efforts. After all, Zen 5 hasn’t launched yet.

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