AMD reportedly not going to make six-core Ryzen CPUs

Seems like we're entering somewhat of a lull in terms of hardware news, we had a lot of big announcements over the last couple of weeks and now with the Chinese New Year there's just not a whole of interesting news out there.

So we start this Monday edition with a rumor about AMD's Ryzen lineup. While it was previously expected that AMD would launch Zen in four, six and eight-core versions, Thai tech site Zolkorn claims six-core parts are not going to happen.

The machine translation from Thai to English is hard to understand but WCCF Tech did its best to figure it out and offers that the Ryzen lineup may look a bit different than previously expected.

If the sources are accurate, the entry-level Ryzen "SR3" may consist of quad-core parts with eight threads, while the "SR5" lineup could be eight-core parts with SMT disabled, which is a bit of a surprise. The "SR7" on the other hand has eight cores and sixteen threads.

It's unknown why there's no six-core lineup but there could be several reasons for this. For example, it could be that from a business perspective, six-cores chips didn't fit in the strategy in terms of performance or yields. Secondly, and this is more speculatively, there's also a slight possibility that the Zen design makes it hard or impossible to create six-core chips. The Zen design consists of modules that have four cores each so in theory you can create a six-core chip by disabling two cores.