CES 2026: Taking the Lids off AMD's Venice and MI400 SoCs

Hello you fine Internet folks,

Here at CES 2026, AMD showed off their upcoming Venice series of server CPUs and their upcoming MI400 series of datacenter accelerators. AMD has talked about the specifications of both Venice and the MI400 series at their Advancing AI event back in June of 2025, but this is the first time AMD has shown off the silicon for both of product lines.

Starting with Venice, the first thing to notice is the packaging of the CCDs to the IO dies is different. Instead of using the organic substrate of the package to run the wires between the CCDs and the IO dies that AMD has used since EPYC Rome, Venice appears to be using a more advanced form of packaging similar to Strix Halo or MI250X. Another change is that Venice appears to have two IO dies instead of the single IO die that the prior EPYC CPUs had.

Venice has 8 CCDs each of which have 32 cores for a total of up to 256 cores per Venice package. Doing some measuring of each of the dies, you get that each CCD is approximately 165mm² of N2 silicon. If AMD has stuck to 4MB of L3 per core than each of these CCDs have 32 Zen 6 cores and 128MB of L3 cache along with the die to die interface for the CCD <-> IO die communications. At approximately 165mm² per CCD, that would make a Zen 6 core plus the 4MB of L3 per core about 5mm² each which is similar to Zen 5’s approximately 5.34mm² on N3 when counting both the Zen 5 core and 4MB of L3 cache.

Moving to the IO dies, they each appear to be approximately 353mm² for a total of just over 700mm² of silicon dedicated for the IO dies. This is a massive increase from the approximately 400mm² that the prior EPYC CPUs dedicated for their IO dies. The two IO dies appear to be using an advanced packaging of some kind similar to the CCDs. Next to the IO dies appear to be 8 little dies, 4 on each side of the package, which are likely to either be structural silicon or deep trench capacitor dies meant to improve power delivery to the CCDs and IO dies.

Shifting off of Venice and on to the MI400 accelerator, this is a massive package with 12 HBM4 dies and “twelve 2 nanometer and 3 nanometer compute and IO dies”. It appears as if there are two base dies just like MI350. But unlike MI350, there appears to also be two extra dies on the top and bottom of the base dies. These two extra dies are likely for off-package IO such as PCIe, UALink, etc.

Calculating the die sizes of the base dies and the IO dies, the die size of the base die is approximately 747mm² for each of the two base dies with the off-package IO dies each being approximately 220mm². As for the compute dies, while the packaging precludes any visual demarcation of the different compute dies, it is likely that there are 8 compute dies with 4 compute dies on each base die. So while we can’t figure out the exact die size of the compute dies, the maximum size is approximately 180mm². The compute chiplet is likely in the 140mm² to 160mm² region but that is a best guess that will have to wait to be confirmed.

The MI455X and Venice are the two SoCs that are going to be powering AMD’s Helios AI Rack but they aren’t the only new Zen 6 and MI400 series products that AMD announced at CES. AMD announced that there would be a third member of the MI400 family called the MI440X joining the MI430X and MI455X. The MI440X is designed to fit into the 8-way UBB boxes as a direct replacement for the MI300/350 series.

AMD also announced Venice-X which is likely is going to be a V-Cache version of Venice. This is interesting because not only did AMD skip Turin-X but if there is a 256 core version of Venice-X, then this would be the first time that a high core count CCD will have the ability to support a V-Cache die. If AMD sticks to the same ratio of base die cache to V-Cache die cache, then each 32 core CCD would have up to 384MB of L3 cache which equates to 3 Gigabytes of L3 cache across the chip.

Both Venice and the MI400 series are due to launch later this year and I can’t wait to learn more about the underlying architectures of both SoCs.

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