In a recent IT technical forum discussion at CERN, one of the presenting engineers pulled up a slide on AMD’s Zen architecture, highlighting that Zen would arrive at some point in a 32-core implementation. Such a chip would have almost 2X the number of cores currently in Intel’s beefiest Xeon processor that currently tops out at an 18-core chip.

The engineer over CERN went on to detail that this high-end Zen CPU would employ a pair of 16-core complexes with a high speed interconnect between them.

AMD's forthcoming processor architecture code named "Zen" is said to offer a 40 percent IPC (Instructions Per Clock) throughput increase over AMD’s previous generation Excavator core. As a result, AMD hopes that Zen will mark the company's return to competitive performance versus Intel in the high-end, 14nm process chip market.

Higher core count doesn’t always translate to higher performance but in combination with Zen’s improved IPC, dense Zen-based AMD Opteron processors could offer very potent and compelling solutions in the data center.

AMD is also rumored to be readying high-end 16-core desktop chips with integrated GPUs sometime in the Q4 this year. AMD is also now readying their Opteron A1100 family based on ARM core technology with integrated 10Gb Ethernet, for server and data center applications as well.