AMD Zen 6 rumor: 24-core flagship, 20-core and 16-core CPUs - and a 12-core X3D gaming chip?

A new leak gives us what could be a look at the core configurations for AMD's Zen 6 desktop CPU range, running up to a 24-core flagship processor.

The theory posted on X by regular leaker HXL (flagged by Wccftech) is that AMD is going to run with 6-core, 8-core, 10-core and 12-core chips - those are the single chiplet models.

Then, AMD will double up on them all save for the baseline six-core model, so there should be two-chiplet models with 16-cores (8+8), 20-cores (10+10) and the 24-core (12+12) flagship.

So, we'd be looking at a big jump in cores for the Ryzen range, with a 50% leap for that flagship - on top of the architectural gains for Zen 6, of course, which could be quite considerable.

There's some hopeful chatter from gamers about the possibility of a single chip 12-core X3D processor which would have one lump of 3D V-Cache for all those cores to use.

This next-gen Zen 6 series of chips is dubbed 'Olympic Ridge' and should be out later this year. It'll be up against Nova Lake from Intel, where Team Blue is also implementing some major changes for its desktop chips. That includes big last-level cache (bLLC) which is essentially Intel's take on X3D to keep up with AMD in that respect.

So, as you can imagine, gamers are excited to see how that pans out, too. And indeed the flagship for Nova Lake is rumored to be a 52-core monster - although the majority of those cores won't be performance ones, of course. The theory is that it'll run with 16 performance cores, 32 efficiency cores, plus 4 low-power cores (add seasoning once again).

Still, that looks worrying for AMD, but said top dog Nova Lake chip is supposedly going to be quite the power hog. Rumor has it that this CPU could be aimed at HEDT territory - so it's not really a fair comparison for the 24-core Zen 6 flagship (in terms of power envelope, or price).

All of this remains in rumor territory, so we'll just have to see how it all shakes out late this year (or early in 2027, perhaps, as even if the plan is for a release timeframe in 2026, that could go awry for either camp).

While there might be some excitement about planning a new PC build around either Zen 6 or Nova Lake, that's going to be tempered by the current climate of price hikes. Not only is RAM ridiculously priced these days, but storage costs have shot up, and GPUs are following a similar trajectory.