We are not quite sure what AMD was thinking when it named a part Zeppelin. After all you would have think that everything to do with the name was really bad. Firstly the rigid airships terrified the UK during WW1, but they had a nasty habit of crashing and exploding. The last one to be seen was drapped with nazi flags and exploded on its first trip to the US.

So what is this part which is named after such a flying disaster so easily outclassed by other technology? Apparently it is a processor which allows Zen to offer 32 physical cores and 64 logical threads per socket.

According to a post at the Linux Kernel Mailing List by AMD's 'Ray' Huang Rui, Zeppelin boasts of support for eight bundles of four cores on a single chip, or 32 physical processing cores.

The Zen architecture is known allow each physical core to execute two threads simultaneously so a 32-core Zeppelin would run 64 simultaneous threads. This means that two four-socket systems may offer up to 256 threads per system.

The number of cores suggested in the code fragment on the list might be a maximum supported. We might never see a 32-core monster-chip at launch. AMD is saying nothing about its Zeppelin at the moment. If it really does call it ZeppelinI bet it is hoping that it would be like this:

Rather than this: