AMD Engineer Inadvertently Leaks First Zen 6 Morpheus CPU Details Including 2nm Node
Well, we have the first leak of any details at all about Zen 6, and they include both the codename "Morpheus" as well as the fact that it will apparently be based on a 2nm process. These early details come, as they so often do, from an AMD engineer's LinkedIn profile which has now been patched up to remove the offending leaks.
Aside from the first Zen 6 info, it's also interesting to observe the timeframes of his work. According to his profile, he was working on Zen 4 as far back as March 2020. Those parts didn't release until September of last year. By that logic, we may see Zen 5 processors in the latter part of this year, which actually coincides with earlier leaks. If that pace holds, then Zen 6 processors could appear in the back half of 2025.
It's not a surprise to read that Zen 5 will be on 3nm, but AMD actually specified "4nm | 3nm" for those parts in an earlier roadmap. It could be that desktop Zen 5 parts will show up first on 4nm, with EPYC following up on the revised 3nm process afterward. The 5th-generation EPYC processors, codenamed Turin, are still far away—Genoa only hit at the end of last year, and the Genoa-X processors with 3D V-Cache are expected to land in Q3 this year.
As for Zen 6, AMD has seemingly been taking its own informal sort of "tick-tock" release cadence, with even-numbered Zen architectures being primarily refinements, while odd-numbered designs are major revisions. With that in mind, we're already expecting Zen 5 to offer big improvements over Zen 4, which was largely a clock bump over Zen 3, architecturally speaking.
Specifically, Zen 5 is rumored to bring some form of hybrid big-little design to Ryzen, and it may happen that Zen 6 offers a refinement of the technology. Unfortunately, this is conjecture based on rumors, so don't take it too seriously—rest assured, we'll let you know as soon as we have the details.
