Sources familiar with AMD's plans confirmed that the company is working hard to bring the new Zen processor on shelves in 2016.
AMD can regain a foothold in the high performance x86 CPU market with Zen, which is rumored to come with a novel microarchitecture, taking a clean slate approach. For the last five years, AMD's dormant presence in the high-end CPU niche allowed Intel to gain serious ground.
According to an exclusive report, AMD aims to launch the Zen based desktop FX CPUs by the last quarter of 2016, probably before the debut of the holiday season. Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that benefit from Zen power should arrive in 2017, at an unspecified date. An APU is a 64-bit microprocessor crafted by AMD, wherein the CPU and GPU units are bundled together.
Although the manufacturing company did not make any official statement as to when Zen will be available for purchase, it seems that late 2016 is a rather good approximation.
Bits and pieces of information further show what you should expect from AMD's new chipset. A number of stock keeping units are planned, with either four, six or eight cores. Not surprisingly, the Zen core is optimized in terms of size and power. AMD is putting a lot of effort into making sure that the Zen FX CPU takes a bite out of Intel's share, which is currently occupied by the i3, i5 and i7 CPUs.
The chipset of Zen FX CPU will come with a special on socket AM4, something that the AMD designed to compete directly with features that Intel excels at. According to inside information from AMD, users will also find improved platform security features embedded in the upcoming hardware.
Come 2017, AMD might be ready to release APUs and servers that use Zen as their central processing unit. The Sunnyvale-based company says that the new chipset will allow performance levels at par with PS4 and Xbox One, even on laptop devices. Another bit of unconfirmed information that sounds promising is that AMD plans to release a high bandwidth memory, with a release date sometime in 2017.
If this rumor stands true, AMD would increase its chances to make a comeback as Intel's rival. AMD has always been the more affordable manufacturer, and with decent power from an AMD APU that is backed by HBM technology, CPUs from Intel backed by DDR4 RAM could become the second option.
