Next-gen Xbox may feature 10-core AMD Zen 6 chip, leaked die shot suggests

[Daniel Sims]

Rumor mill: As details about AMD's upcoming chips continue to emerge, some leaks inevitably contain clues about Sony's and Microsoft's next-generation game consoles. A recently surfaced die shot has sparked fresh speculation about these devices, with both companies planning to launch them within the next couple of years.

Trusted leaker KeplerL2 recently said that a newly surfaced die shot likely shows the APU for Microsoft's next-generation Xbox console. The chip, built on AMD's upcoming Zen 6 CPU architecture, might hint at the device's core configuration.

YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead recently shared a color-coded diagram of an in-development AMD APU codenamed "Magnus." Its unusual configuration – Zen 6 CPU cores on a 144 mm² SoC die alongside a massive 264 mm² graphics die – and its categorization as "semi-custom" suggest the chip likely powers an upcoming game console.

Although Moore's Law is Dead speculated that Magnus could be the PlayStation 6 processor, Kepler believes it's more likely an Xbox APU for a couple of reasons. First, it appears larger and more expensive than the types of chips PlayStation designer Mark Cerny typically favors. Second, Kepler claims that Sony's as-yet-unrevealed PS6 APU codename continues the company's tradition of drawing from characters in William Shakespeare's plays. The chip will reportedly debut under the sixth pseudonym Sony has borrowed from The Tempest.

Magnus features three Zen 6 cores and eight Zen 6c cores, totaling 11 cores built on AMD's new CPU architecture. Kepler speculates it will function as a 10-core, 20-thread processor, with one core left over for binning. Although the diagram doesn't show GPU compute units, Kepler believes the chip will include 80 – up from the PlayStation 5 Pro's 60.

Another clue pointing to Magnus as an Xbox chip is its massive 384-bit memory bus. Sony has favored a 256-bit bus for all PlayStation 4 and 5 models, while Microsoft's Xbox One X used a 384-bit bus, and the Series X features a 320-bit bus.

Kepler previously claimed that both the PS6 and the next Xbox will use AMD's upcoming UDNA graphics architecture, which succeeds the RDNA 4 architecture found in the recently released Radeon RX 90 series graphics cards. This new architecture should deliver significant improvements in ray tracing and machine learning compared to RDNA 4 and the RDNA 2 chips powering the PS5 and Xbox Series X.

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Next-gen Xbox may feature 10-core AMD Zen 6 chip, leaked die shot suggests

 

[Kirby1]

Definitely seems plausible.

Hoping it has 32GBs of ram and at least ~9070 level performance with more mature ML and RT features to make path tracing at decent res with good upscaling a standard feature for next gen.

I think $800 would be reasonable for a next gen console that aims to be more high end from the start, but I think it needs to stay well under $1000.

 

[Vulcanproject]

Microsoft tried to make Series X the most powerful console. They stated this from the reveal, that was their intention.

They essentially failed. On paper it was but a clever PS5 Cerny led design hardly gives anything away in terms of performance. The Series X APU is considerably larger than PS5's but the ultimate result is a machine only marginally faster on its best day.

Perhaps Microsoft are looking to push the boat out this time and going back to separate processor dies. Expensive, but almost certainly would then be faster than any likely APU designs.

 

[bviktor]

The hardware is irrelevant. As long as they

1) don't make any new exclusives
2) even keep losing their existing exclusives

this platform is poised to die. I just sold my XSX for this very reason. There's just no exclusives which would make me keep it. I can play all my games on the PS5.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Consoles live and die by software. Not hardware. The series X is more powerful than the PS5 and its sales are dismal.

So long as MS continues to make garbage games (and ports them to PC) there will be no reason to buy an xbox over a PS5. Especially if MS continues to insist on proprietary storage on top of it.

 

[Aus spot]

So is it a 10 core or 6 core? Major and sub headlines conflict.

 

[AndreV]

Microsoft tried to make Series X the most powerful console. They stated this from the reveal, that was their intention.

They essentially failed. On paper it was but a clever PS5 Cerny led design hardly gives anything away in terms of performance. The Series X APU is considerably larger than PS5's but the ultimate result is a machine only marginally faster on its best day.

Perhaps Microsoft are looking to push the boat out this time and going back to separate processor dies. Expensive, but almost certainly would then be faster than any likely APU designs.

SX is clearly faster than PS5 as some of its metrics even get very close to the PS5 Pro. what makes it "weaker" is how it its used by the developers. You cant say a certain car is bad because its used poorly or if the road is bad and not discredit yourself.

 

[HardReset]

So is it a 10 core or 6 core? Major and sub headlines conflict.

Zen 6 is CPU srchitecture. There are 3*Zen 6 cores and 7*Zen 6c cores.

 

[OortCloud]

MS need to knock it out the park with the next XBOX launch to get back on par with Sony - something like the 360 but without the red rings!

Rumours about Steam integration are interesting. A nice easy to use, powerful, small box in the lounge with access to your Steam back catalogue, Game Pass and 'normal' Xbox games would be pretty compelling.

 

[Aus spot]

Zen 6 is CPU srchitecture. There are 3*Zen 6 cores and 7*Zen 6c cores.

Thanks mate, known, but they have since fixed the headline.

 

[Xelions]

Consoles live and die by software. Not hardware.

I second this

 

[Puiu]

Wouldn't it easier and more efficient to make it an APU with 8 Zen 6c cores and more space and power allocated to the GPU? It's not like they are aiming for 240-300Hz gaming on a console.

 

[HardReset]

Wouldn't it easier and more efficient to make it an APU with 8 Zen 6c cores and more space and power allocated to the GPU? It's not like they are aiming for 240-300Hz gaming on a console.

Removing 3 Zen 6 cores would leave quite little extra room for GPU. And anything that is single threaded and CPU bound would slow down around 40% (estimated). Not worth it.

 

[PsyDuck87]

Does it really matter when they release another underpowered device like the Series S that just ends up holding back high-end consoles again?

 

[Cal Jeffrey]

Consoles live and die by software. Not hardware. The series X is more powerful than the PS5 and its sales are dismal.

So long as MS continues to make garbage games (and ports them to PC) there will be no reason to buy an xbox over a PS5. Especially if MS continues to insist on proprietary storage on top of it.

^^^This^^^

IMO. I'm really disappointed that we're already talking about next-gen when PS5/XBXS haven't even hit their stride. There has been a decrease in quality games this generation and a huge increase in shovelware. Just yesterday, I scrolled through hundreds of games priced under $5 that were of very low quality. There are some good AAA games, but none of them really push the hardware.

"Yeah but what about Cyberpunk 2077, Cal?"

That game was a shtshow at launch and has gotten better, but it still does not push the hardware much on consoles (aside from pushing it because of poor optimization). In past generations, now is about the time that we start seeing highly optimized games that really take advantage of every single compute the console is capable of. So far, I haven't seen that.

So IMO, launching the latest greatest hardware in just a couple of years is pure hype. Until we start seeing PS and XB games that are truly impressive from a hardware standpoint, I have no interest in a next-gen machine.

 

[texasrattler]

Definitely seems plausible.

Hoping it has 32GBs of ram and at least ~9070 level performance with more mature ML and RT features to make path tracing at decent res with good upscaling a standard feature for next gen.

I think $800 would be reasonable for a next gen console that aims to be more high end from the start, but I think it needs to stay well under $1000.

I doubt they cost more than $600 for whatever the base model is.. There may be a higher model of course. But more than likely I'd say $500-700 range is likely. Unless something changes, thats about the pricing I'm expecting.

 

[Kirby1]

I doubt they cost more than $600 for whatever the base model is.. There may be a higher model of course. But more than likely I'd say $500-700 range is likely. Unless something changes, thats about the pricing I'm expecting.

I don't think you have been following Microsoft's plans for next gen if you think the next Xbox will be in the $500 range. It's going to compete with PC prebuilds.

 

[Puiu]

Removing 3 Zen 6 cores would leave quite little extra room for GPU. And anything that is single threaded and CPU bound would slow down around 40% (estimated). Not worth it.

That would assume that the APU runs the big cores at full blast like with the desktop variants and is not heavily limiting the max clock speeds.

The main difference between Zen 6 and Zen 6C are the clock speeds and smaller L3 cache. If you take out the clock speed advantage then performance isn't that far off between them. Set them both to around 4.0-4.2GHz and you are probably looking at a 10-15% difference. (PS5 Pro goes up to 3.85GHz for reference)

And even if it was "40%", it's still more than enough to get 144Hz on a console. It doesn't need the 3 big cores. For 4K gaming what you need is GPU power. Zen6C is already leaps and bounds above what the PS5 Pro has.

And if the devs can't take advantage of a modern powerful 8 core CPU in 2026 with an API that is close to the metal... then I don't need that game.

 

[texasrattler]

I don't think you have been following Microsoft's plans for next gen if you think the next Xbox will be in the $500 range. It's going to compete with PC prebuilds.

We will see soon enough. I highly doubt many will be buying one if they are $800 to 1K. It would be out of most kids, even young adults range. Might as just invest in a computer at that point.

 

[texasrattler]

I don't think you have been following Microsoft's plans for next gen if you think the next Xbox will be in the $500 range. It's going to compete with PC prebuilds.

Also I said $500-$700. The lowest would be $500 which would likely mean there could be a higher model up to $700.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

^^^This^^^

IMO. I'm really disappointed that we're already talking about next-gen when PS5/XBXS haven't even hit their stride. There has been a decrease in quality games this generation and a huge increase in shovelware. Just yesterday, I scrolled through hundreds of games priced under $5 that were of very low quality. There are some good AAA games, but none of them really push the hardware.

"Yeah but what about Cyberpunk 2077, Cal?"

That game was a shtshow at launch and has gotten better, but it still does not push the hardware much on consoles (aside from pushing it because of poor optimization). In past generations, now is about the time that we start seeing highly optimized games that really take advantage of every single compute the console is capable of. So far, I haven't seen that.

So IMO, launching the latest greatest hardware in just a couple of years is pure hype. Until we start seeing PS and XB games that are truly impressive from a hardware standpoint, I have no interest in a next-gen machine.

There's been a serious decline in the quality of work most dev houses are putting out. There's a lot of reasons for this, but the biggest take away is that nobody optimizes code anymore, they just like to throw more hardware and image scaling at the problem instead so they can chase 0.5% better looking character models (which they then intentionally make ugly so you cant tell anyway LOL).

And in the end, anything good comes to PC anyway. You can count the good PS5 exclusives not on PC on one hand, after a firework accident.

The only console that doesnt follow this is the switch, and.....well, we all know how that ended.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

We will see soon enough. I highly doubt many will be buying one if they are $800 to 1K. It would be out of most kids, even young adults range. Might as just invest in a computer at that point.

Nobody targets this stuff at kids anymore, except nintendo. Corporations long figured out that the childless adults have way more expendable income and will willingly pay $700+ for a console. At the current rate of inflation by the time the PS6 comes out we could very well see $1000 prices.

 

[HardReset]

That would assume that the APU runs the big cores at full blast like with the desktop variants and is not heavily limiting the max clock speeds.

The main difference between Zen 6 and Zen 6C are the clock speeds and smaller L3 cache. If you take out the clock speed advantage then performance isn't that far off between them. Set them both to around 4.0-4.2GHz and you are probably looking at a 10-15% difference. (PS5 Pro goes up to 3.85GHz for reference)

And even if it was "40%", it's still more than enough to get 144Hz on a console. It doesn't need the 3 big cores. For 4K gaming what you need is GPU power. Zen6C is already leaps and bounds above what the PS5 Pro has.

And if the devs can't take advantage of a modern powerful 8 core CPU in 2026 with an API that is close to the metal... then I don't need that game.

This chip is semi-custom. There is no L3 cache difference between Zen 6 and Zen 6c, unless designers want it so. Cache configuration could be anything that is easy to do. Zen 6 clock speed advantage may be pretty big as there is now different set of cores and not all cores need basically same clock speeds like with PS5 pro.

Having few Zen 6 cores mean much less bottlenecks on single or light multi thread thread bottleneck situations and as Zen 6c cannot clock so high, having cores with different clock speeds is necessity by design. Not to annoy software developers.

I would not say pure Zen 6c CPU for gaming is "modern". Clock speed are just way too low. Zen 6 helps here a lot.

 

[Raysterize]

The PS5 is better due to the unified memory pool vs Xbox Series X's split pool of faster and slow memory, also the PS5 has a much faster SSD. Hopefully Microsoft don't do anything stupid again like eDRAM in the Xbox 360, and eSRAM in the Xbox One. Just have a unified pool of 32GB (Or 24GB minimum). 20 Thread minimum for the CPU but 24 would be better and needs to be about as powerful as a 9070. 2TB M.2 SSD Gen x5 10,000 Read/10,000 Write.

 

[Puiu]

This chip is semi-custom. There is no L3 cache difference between Zen 6 and Zen 6c, unless designers want it so. Cache configuration could be anything that is easy to do. Zen 6 clock speed advantage may be pretty big as there is now different set of cores and not all cores need basically same clock speeds like with PS5 pro.

Having few Zen 6 cores mean much less bottlenecks on single or light multi thread thread bottleneck situations and as Zen 6c cannot clock so high, having cores with different clock speeds is necessity by design. Not to annoy software developers.

I would not say pure Zen 6c CPU for gaming is "modern". Clock speed are just way too low. Zen 6 helps here a lot.

By not removing half of the L3 cache then you don't really have Zen 6C, it's just a downclocked Zen 6 which is slightly denser.

~I would not say pure Zen 6c CPU for gaming is "modern"~ I'm assuming that by "modern" gaming you mean ultra high FPS and max settings on an high end PC. As long as TVs are capped at 120/144Hz, you don't need the high clock speeds of the full Zen 6 core. The fixed hardware and close to the metal APIs should in theory make up the gap with higher end desktop CPUs for 4K gaming.